If you have an online or offline business, you most likely need the help of a professional graphic designer. In the end, it’s design that helps shape your brand, make it recognizable, help your products or services look more appealing to the target audience, and convey all the different messages with the help of attractive visuals. 

Still, understanding how a graphic designer can benefit your business is just the first step of the process. The road to actually hiring the right expert for your needs can be long and rocky. Luckily, we at TodayMade can make this road easier for you, explaining which common collaboration options are there and highlighting their pros and cons. 

Should you hire an in-house designer or outsource? 

The most obvious, but not necessarily the best option is hiring an in-house designer. Such a professional can aid your business anytime (obviously, within working hours). Working with the same designer also helps ensure that all the design-related tasks will be consistent in style and quality. 

However, hiring and onboarding an in-house designer takes time and costs that not every business, especially a small one, has. If you’re just starting or need expert help as quickly as possible, outsourcing your graphic design needs could be a much better option.

Primary choices available for graphic design outsourcing

Graphic design outsourcing allows you to get the help of a design professional as quickly as you need it. Furthermore, you will decide for how long you’ll need this help and will be able to terminate collaboration instantly after the job is done.

The most common outsourcing options are hiring a freelance graphic designer vs agency collaboration with another, more contemporary option joining this list — subscription-based design services. But before we get to the latter approach, let’s first focus on two former ones, figuring out the agency and freelance graphic designer pros and cons. 

An idea: I would suggest creating a table either in this section or later, summing up pros and cons of each hiring method. The reason is to cut the time needed to get the info from the article, when the reader doesn't want to read all the info to get to the point, they can easily skim through your table and get the desired information.

As an experimental alternative, it could be interesting to even add such a table in the "primary choices" section, which would save even more time for readers, for which they'd be grateful as well.

Hiring a freelance graphic designer

First, let’s figure out what do freelance graphic designers do. Freelance graphic designers are independent professionals who offer their services to various companies and clients. They can focus solely on your project or simultaneously juggle several projects for different clients. 

The decision to hire a freelance graphic designer can be a good option if you are looking for a professional with specific skills (for instance, a branding expert) or a style that matches your preferences. To succeed in this highly competitive niche, designers work hard, keeping up with trends and constantly honing their skills. 

Working with a freelancer can also help you save time and money. As freelance designers don’t have as big operational expenses as agencies, they can charge less for their services and dedicate all their attention to your project.

At the same time, the decision to hire freelance designers comes with certain risks. A freelance professional usually operates independently, meaning if something unexpected (like illness or personal circumstances) happens, such a designer will become unavailable for a certain period, and deadlines will have to be shifted.

Being a one-person army also means that a freelancer of choice might have their limitations in terms of resources, skills, and availability, especially for larger projects or tight deadlines. You can spend time picking the right designer for your needs only to find out that their schedule is packed and they won’t be able to pick up your project, or at least deliver it when expected. 

What’s more, human factors also should be taken into account. A portfolio and an initial conversation might not be enough to ensure that you’ll like the designs and the collaboration process. Sometimes freelancers can fail to follow your brand guidelines, deliver great results consistently, or meet deadlines.

Working with a design agency

A graphic design agency has its own carefully selected team of in-house designers and offers its services to various companies and clients. It usually has its own project managers that organize the design outsourcing process.

Agencies care a lot about its reputation and do all it takes to deliver the projects successfully and please the clients. If you decide to hire a website design agency, you can be sure that the project will be delivered within an agreed timeline — unless you suddenly decide to change something and prolong the deadline.

If you decide to hire a design agency, this will also give you access to a wide pool of design talents with any specific skill you might need: brand identity, logo or font creation, motion design, 3D graphics, and many more. Furthermore, agency professionals often communicate and collaborate with each other, meaning you get all the profit from their shared experience and insights.

Of course, these benefits come at a price. Agencies usually charge higher rates for their work. Furthermore, projects can take longer to complete as they may need to go through multiple layers of approval within the agency. 

So, if your budget is tight, this might be challenging for you: not only do you pay more, but there’s a chance that you end up paying more than expected because the project lasts longer than expected. 

With freelance designers, it can be difficult to return to them later to implement some edits to your projects, since a designer can be unavailable. However, a similar situation can also happen when you hire a web design agency. While they’ll gladly pick up a project again, they still might not be able to assign the same designer. 

As you can see, while choosing between freelance graphic design vs agency might be a great fit for you, they also might turn out not to be the best option these days.

They may not always align with the evolving needs and expectations of businesses and have various limitations.

That’s why a new option has emerged, which we’re going to discuss – subscription-based services.

Why subscription-based services can be a great fit for your design needs?

A subscription-based service is a modern and efficient solution specifically tailored to the demands of the modern digital age. Such a service allows you to purchase a monthly subscription that unlocks unlimited access to a company’s design team. Basically, you pay for a month and receive design support not for one specific project but for as many as you need before a subscription runs out. You can extend it after this month or end your subscription if you feel that all your requests have been completed already. 

Working with a subscription-based service is similar to the design agency model. The pros and cons are more or less the same, except subscription services are cheaper and allow you to work on several projects simultaneously. 

This is especially beneficial for small companies or startups that are just launching and need loads of different services, from branding to social media templates. However, more mature companies can benefit from subscriptions too. For instance, opting for subscription-based services during hot seasons when businesses are running out of hands to prepare materials for promos and new marketing campaigns is a wise thing to do. 

TodayMade as your subscription-based service of choice 

TodayMade is a modern subscription-based design solution created by people who know how painful it might be not to have enough designers to support you during peak seasons. That’s why we created a service that helps companies get all the design help needed for a price starting from $4,999 a month.

Our designers will have your back during the most challenging episodes, be it social media creation, a busy season, or the launch of several important marketing campaigns at once. We understand how fast-paced the marketing world is and work hard to keep up with this pace, offering you impeccable quality designs within reasonable terms. 

TodayMade focuses on delivering a balance between speed, cost, and quality, and therefore can be the best fit for projects of all sizes. If you are curious to learn more, reach out to us, and let’s discuss your projects together!