Tag Archives: designer

Have you ever missed a client deadline because you were too busy?  Ever had a client request a type of design that you don’t offer?  One of the best kept secrets of successful designers and studios is ‘designer-to-designer’ outsourcing.  Designer-to-designer outsourcing involves one designer (such as a web design firm or graphic design studio) using another designer (often a freelance designer or sub-contractor) to help complete designs for their own clients. While there are scores of freelancers available (probably many in your own city), there are some emerging, and very powerful, online services that are setup specifically for designers seeking to outsource client projects. For example, last month Entrepreneur.com featured DesignCrowd and its new Graphic Design Outsourcing Service that lets design studios outsource to other designers around the world.  Whether you use a service like DesignCrowd, or a freelance designer you find in a directory, outsourcing is an important part of a designer’s toolkit.  Here’s how design outsourcing works (using DesignCrowd as an example): Once you acknowledge that, in general, outsourcing is useful – the main battle for a designer is selecting the right project or task to outsource and the right person or company to outsource to.  This post focuses on the situations that a graphic design studio or professional designer should consider outsourcing to another graphic designer as well as some of the resources designers can use in those situations. 7 Situations Designers Outsource to Other Designers Here are 7 specific reasons or situations where graphic designers will often seek to outsource to other graphic designers: 1) Preventing Client Loss (due to capacity) - if you find yourself turning away clients because you’re too busy – or (worst of all) find yourself taking on clients who become unhappy and then leave when you don’t meet a deadline – then you need to increase your ‘capacity’ to take on client projects.  Outsourcing is a good option in this situation as it can add design ‘capacity’ to yourself, your team or your business with minimal setup time.  For custom design projects, we recommend using  DesignCrowd’s online design outsourcing service. As DesignCrowd has around 10,000 designers and lets you use multiple designers on each project you run, essentially, they can provide access to unlimited capacity