8 awesome reasons to use an independent creative brand designer
You have approached a few brand agencies, and the prices quoted are crazy! But you recognise that you really need that level of high-quality strategic brand design to grow your business.
So what are your options?
Business owners see working with an independent or ‘freelance’ designer as a potential risk. For sure, definitely, there CAN be a risk. An inexperienced art college graduate with no design chops or using outsourcing online platforms is very inexpensive – but promises much and delivers disappointment.
Many seasoned designers deliver great work with no quality risk at all – you just need that extra effort bit of digging around on the interwebs.
There are many benefits – quite apart from the indisputable fact that we are MUCH less expensive than the more prominent brand agencies.
Here are eight good reasons why it is a good choice to use a smaller-scale creative partner for your next branding design project.
Overhead fees. The cost of excellent brand design does not need to be huge.
Freelance brand designers or tiny design outfits have a hot desk, small shared office, or work from home. This means we do not have the massive overheads of an established branding agency – such as office space rent, many staff, and the CEO’s Ferrari.
If you’re hiring a brand agency, their rates will be factoring in the cost of employing staff who do other things irrelevant to your particular project – so a chunk of the fee you pay is paying their wages. There are considerable cost savings that you can easily make when choosing a smaller-scale corporate branding expert for freelance brand design.
Attention to detail.
It’s straightforward for your business branding project to become one of many when working with a bigger brand agency.
Freelance brand designers/small design outfits tend to work from project to project or have only a few brand projects active at any time. This means we have a greater level of focus on your exact requirements. Also, keep in mind that larger agencies might frequently get a more junior designer or less talented staff to roll out subsequent designs after the initial pitch/agreement. For example, I carry out ALL creative work and do not outsource design at all, so the attention to excellence is constant throughout our relationship.
No confusion. A direct channel of project communication.
If you’ve ever previously worked with an agency – say on a website, you’ll find that you’ll have to go through an account manager, who then passes on your queries, and requirements and amends to the art director, who then briefs the designer who then briefs the web developer – who then implements them and then it is the same chain of communication in reverse. So what can take a day for an agency can literally take minutes with a freelance brand/web designer – the time is billable money.
Freelance brand designers are experts in handling both the client liaison aspect of the project as well the actual implementation of all the requests – you’re actually passing your requests directly to the person who will be doing all the work – so there is no confusion as to what has to be actioned, and it gets done immediately.
The need for speed.
Dealing directly with the freelancer working on your project often shortens the time to completion. There is no chain involved in getting your project requirements implemented, and any changes can be done immediately rather than falling into the inbox of a designer in an agency who may have 20 other jobs their boss has asked them to complete by the end of the day.
Your brand design project is more important to us.
A bold statement, perhaps, but freelancers tend to work from project to project, so your brochure, website, or brand identity will be the most important project we’re working on. Agencies operate with many more clients and prioritise the work schedule based on the client’s approved budget. If your project is competing for a much more valuable job, then there’s a distinct possibility your own project may be bumped down the list in favour of the bigger client’s deadline.
We’ll always go that extra mile.
Freelance brand designers are much more flexible, and we are hugely passionate about our work. You have a better chance of pushing your project through quickly with a freelancer. We’re interested and find value in building long-term relationships so that, hopefully, we can become your permanent Satellite Design & Marketing Department. So, if you’re very nice to us, we may opt to work on your project outside of traditional office hours if there is an emergency deadline.
We have great networks.
As a business owner, you may now be almost convinced about trying the freelance route when it comes to branding/rebranding but are perhaps thinking that if you engage an expensive agency, you’re not only hiring someone who is specialised purely in brand, web, and graphic design – but who also offers a cohesive turnkey solution which also provides PR, social media marketing, video, copywriting, search engine optimisation.
Of course, this is correct; you’ll get extended services by hiring an expensive agency – but the project cost will certainly reflect this. As freelancers, we have great networks of contacts that can carry out all these functions, and guess what? At a far lower cost. We refer each other and work together on client projects based purely on specific requirements rather than keeping multiple staff on a salary.
So, who is actually doing the work?
This might come as a surprise, but that project you’ve just paid an agency AED6,000 a day to complete – well, a freelancer did it for you – but for much less money!
Brand agencies often call in freelance brand designers to work on design projects that they don’t want to turn down but need the in-house resources to complete at the time. When I started my career in London, I signed up for a “temping” agency and worked on many cool blue-chip projects with many brand companies. These agencies collected a giant client pay cheque at project finalisation and paid me less than a quarter of this. Why not just remove this excess cost from the get-go?
To sum it all up
Many business owners I meet in Dubai and globally struggle to find the huge budgets charged by the bigger brand agencies for the high quality level they seek. Yes, the big boys deliver excellent results, but there is an alternative solution within your budget if you shop around and look hard enough.