At some point, every business will need to have some design work done for them. Depending on the budget of the company, they will either hire an advertising agency, utilize their in-house designer employees, or work with a freelancer. The challenge is to find which of those options best fits your marketing strategy, your marketing goals, and your marketing budget.
Advertising agencies are good. They have multi-million dollar accounts – undoubtedly you have seen tons of work from agencies without even thinking about it. They tend to be the items you purchase because of a commercial you saw on television, or the jar of designer spaghetti sauce you just paid $8 for based on the fact you liked the packaging (they got you again!) There are many talented artists within an agency. There are also a lot of other things that you wouldn’t think about when you are looking for design work. You have copy writers, account executives, creative directors, art directors, production artists, media buyers, producers, account planners, traffic managers, and the agency location (space they rent). They all serve a function in making the advertising agency a figurative one stop shop for all their clients’ needs.
The problem, however, is that even if you only want an annual report or brochure designed, those other departments that won’t be used in the process are having an effect on the price of the work created. It’s called overhead, and it’s a major factor when it comes to cost on a project. You are paying for the agency to have those departments even though your project doesn’t require them. This is one reason that agencies tend to be higher cost for design than freelancers, and an element that requires them to seek out large companies as their clients.
Another option is an in-house graphics department. This is a good option if you tend to have a lot of marketing materials that you are using internally and externally. The thing to make certain of is you are getting a good return on your investment. Think of this: if you have a designer, you have the cost of their salary, their equipment, the software, the continued training, the insurance, unemployment insurance, workers compensation, taxes, vacation, sick days, vacation days, overtime, and many other factors. If you take the median salary for a graphic designer – $45,058 (as of this writing), and factor in the items listed above, you will see that you can easily spend upwards of $60,000 for a single graphic designer per year. In most cases, if you hire one designer, you will likely need another to help out with project volume… but let’s stick with one designer for now. In the case illustrated here, you would have to be getting enough return on your investment to warrant the possible $60,000 per year that the company would be spending for having this designer in-house. Granted, the company needs the design work to be done, and if the volume of work is high, an in-house solution would be better financially than if an advertising agency did the same amount of work. The problem with this solutions becomes a factor when the design work is not continuous, when you have a great need for a lot right now because of new branding strategies or a new marketing campaign, but work that gradually decreases over the following months to year.
A good example would be a web site. A company shouldn’t hire a web designer/developer to come in a build a new site, and then put them on webmaster duty for the rest of the year… and at the same annual salary. A designer/developer warrants more money than a web maintenance technician, and frankly if you were to do that to an accomplished designer/developer, they would become bored in a matter of months and move on to another job.
This is where the final option in our study comes into effect. The freelance designer, like schemedia®, is a great solution for the small to medium sized company that is thinking of hiring for an in-house design position. The main factor that makes this option appealing is that you only pay for work that needs to be done. You don’t have an annual salary, or the other expenses that go along with an employee. You don’t have the added expenses of departments you don’t need for your projects (as with an advertising agency).
Most freelance designers will work from home. Don’t let this put you off… the most important thing to realize with this point is that there is no additional overhead. They already own their equipment, they don’t need insurance, etc., so their costs per project tend to be lower. The average rate for a freelance designer is $50-$150 per hour. That may seem like a lot, since if you were an employer, you would hire someone at $22 per hour (based on the annual median rate), but keep in mind that you only pay the designer when you need them. If a company only has $15,000 worth of design expenditures per year (150 hours at $100/hr), why pay an employee $45,000? Three times as much as what you would have paid to a mid priced freelancer. Another benefit of using a freelancer is since they have multiple clients, they are able to keep things fresh because they are constantly exposed to needs and graphic standards outside of your business design needs. Having a wide variety of projects also helps to hone the skills of the freelancer – as they are free to experiment with new techniques more freely than an in-house employee who has to adhere to guidelines set forth by the branding guidelines.
The main factors in deciding which option is best for your company are: size of your company, what your annual design budget will be, the amount you want in ROI, and how many design projects you will have over a given period of time.
