Top 10 Outsourced Design Services for Enterprises to Entrepreneurs

Design isn’t just about aesthetics. Creative design can help you inform and delight your customers and communicate complex concepts in a digestible way. Whether you’re preparing a slide deck for an upcoming workshop, producing an e-book or creating a landing page for a new ad campaign, good design can help elevate the customer experience for all of these various projects.

However, even with an in-house designer or design team, it can be challenging for these professionals to keep up with the entire organization’s design needs, especially when they have their own projects to oversee and deliver.

Often, companies who run into this design bottleneck choose one of the following two options:

• Option 1: freelancer or agency. They outsource their overflow work to a freelancer or agency, which they then have to monitor, manage and spend a lot of time on administrative work to keep things running smoothly.
• Option 2: hire in-house. They hire more in-house talent, which comes with all of the added costs and responsibilities of recruitment, onboarding and employee retention.

However, there is a third option that more and more companies are using. Don’t have the time or resources to hire an in-house or a freelance designer? Or simply need to scale design efficiently while leveraging a variety of design skills?

Option 3: flexible design service. You can outsource your design work to a creative design subscription service.

Superside offers always-on, flexible creative design services. We package everything into subscription plans that can be customized to your needs. You get design support exactly when you need it, with a service that’s faster, cheaper and more reliable than other solutions.

In this post, we lay out everything you need to know about outsourcing creative design to a company and answer some common questions. We’ve also put together a graphic design services comparison guide so you can find the right tool or service for your business.

What are Creative Design Services?

Need someone to whip up a new slide deck, Facebook ad image or landing page? Creative design services can help you with that. These companies are like a one-stop-shop for your creative design needs.

For a flat monthly fee or project-to-project pricing, these services will connect you to designers who can deliver projects quickly with (hopefully) little back-and-forth. There are even services like Superside who provide creative project managers as your first point of contact, building design teams based on each customer’s needs. Less friction, faster turnarounds.

Creative design services typically support their customers with the following types of design work, though some services may narrow down on a specific area, such as:

• Digital Advertising Design
• Motion Design
• PowerPoint Design
• Brand Identity Design
• Landing Page Design
• Photo and Image Design
• Illustration and Infographic Design
• Magazine and Brochure Design
• Newsletter and Blog Post Design
• App and Web Product Design
• Print Design
• Packaging and Merchandise Design

Who Needs Graphic Design Services?

Typically, we find that marketing and growth teams, creative and design teams and business and operations teams benefit from graphic design services the most.

Marketing and Growth

The name of the game in marketing and growth is speed and creative refresh. These teams often need to produce a lot of creative but don’t have the time or enough design talent to get it done efficiently.

Common design needs:

• Landing pages
• Social posts
• Digital ads

Business and Operations

These teams are subject matter experts, but design likely isn’t their forte. They need creative support to visually convey complex ideas in a way that’s cohesive and on-brand.

Common design needs:

• Presentation decks
• Explainer videos
• Product design

Creative and Design teams

These teams get pulled in to support other departments’ design needs (see: marketing and ops), which leaves them with little time to focus on their own projects or big picture thinking. Depending on how the creative/design team is built, they may have designers focused on different business areas, such as product or marketing.

Common design needs:

• Overflow designs
• Brand identity and larger branding projects
• More niche design projects that require specific skill sets (e.g., motion, UX/UI, etc.)

Why You Need Graphic Design Creative Services

You might think that hiring in-house talent or a large agency is the best way to maintain quality and consistency, but often, it’s the opposite. You’ll need to devote a lot of time to project management, communication and onboarding to get optimal results for both options. It’s also rare that you’ll find a new hire, contractor or agency with all of the design skills you’ll need.

With graphic design creative services, you can reduce design overhead and costs while also having access to a full range of capabilities. Graphic design services are much more scalable, as you can increase your creative capacity during busy times without increasing your headcount
, and the fast turnaround times (typically under 48 hours) are pretty tough to beat. Lastly, these services can take most of the grunt work off of your internal designers’ plates, so they can focus on core tasks rather than producing 100 banner ads or updating PowerPoint decks.

10 Creative Design Services for all Company Sizes and Budgets

Outsourced Design For Enterprises and Scale-Ups

These services are an excellent fit for fast-growing brands with high day-to-day design needs. If you’re looking for a more fully managed process and require consistent design work over a longer period of time, then design services in this category are for you.

1. Superside

Trusted by Amazon, Salesforce, Facebook and many more, Superside offers a wide range of design capabilities. From your typical digital ads and infographics to more niche offers like illustration, motion graphics and web design, we’re a full stack solution for businesses.

Superside is known for lightning-fast turnaround times (12-24 hours if needed) and an intuitive design collaboration platform where you can see all your projects in one place. You can also rest easy knowing your design work is being handled by top-tier ex-agency talent from the likes of McCann, Ogilvy & Mather and Sancho BBDOO. We have over 100+ global designers on the team that are highly vetted and go through a standard interview process.

Here’s a look at our design management platform that our customers use to help order, plan and manage their designs. They can also invite colleagues and other teams to help make collaboration and design feedback, simple.

Pricing: Starts at $3000/month, billed quarterly for Level 1 plan (50 hours/month, including 15 hrs of fast turnaround service)

2. Lightboard

Known for its customer experience and quick project delivery times, Lightboard is a solid choice for businesses that need a lot of design work done fast. Lightboard provides every customer with an account manager to keep projects on track. They also give customers access to their design best practices, where they share what they’ve learned from completing thousands of projects.

Pricing: Monthly membership starts at US$2750/month for 25 hours. Hourly pricing is $125/hour. Same-day estimates are available on request.

3. Adaptable

Adaptable is one of the more niche options on this list, offering scalable web design and development services. While they have slightly slower turnaround times (two to four days, on average), their “all-you-can-ask” monthly subscription includes more complex services like prototyping, conversion rate optimization and workflow automation.

Pricing: Starts at US$2900/month

4. Designed.co

Designed.co’s monthly subscription services boast features like unlimited designs and revisions, one-day average turnaround times and a full-stack design-ops team complete with a designer, art director and project manager. Another highlight? Their team is made up of all local, US-Based full-time employees.

Pricing: Starts at US$2250/month for a 6-month plan, US$2500 for month-to-month pricing.

Outsourced Design for Small Businesses

These solutions can be good for early stage start-ups that are scaling up their content production, or small businesses who don’t have as much design or budget. Companies in this category provide packages that are less robust and require a smaller monthly commitment.

5. UnicornGo

UnicornGo’s service includes all of the standard features – unlimited designs and revisions and one to two-day turnaround times. They also offer a 14-day money-back guarantee. However, their basic plan is limited to one design request at a time.

Pricing: Starts at US$399/month for the sparkle plan

6. Penji

Penji’s service is known for their responsive customer communication and their “clean and easy-to-use” platform. Their subscription includes unlimited projects and revisions for a flat monthly rate and also offers human support and team collaboration.

Pricing: Pro plan starts at US$399/month (options to pay quarterly or yearly and save)

7. Kimp

Kimp may be one of the cheaper options on this list, but they offer a lot of bang for your buck. Their monthly subscription includes unlimited design requests and revisions. They’re also known for their speedy response and turnaround times (often 24 hours or less).

Pricing: Starts at US$389/month for their graphic design plan.

Outsourced Design for Entrepreneurs or One-Off Projects

These budget-friendly options are a good choice for entrepreneurs or small teams with even smaller design budgets. You can request one-off-projects or commit to a low investment monthly plan.

8. Design Shifu

Design Shifu offers 24/7 live chat support, in-house designers and a 24-hour turnaround time for a modest monthly rate. They also provide pay-per-request and monthly limited plans for clients who want more flexibility.

Pricing: Starting at US$29 for one request, US$299 for the monthly unlimited plan.

9. DesignsUnlimited

As their name suggests, Designs Unlimited includes unlimited design requests and revisions in their service. However, their turnaround times (two to three days) are a little slower than the other options on this list. Their scope of services is also pretty limited – they don’t do original logos, complex graphics, HTML/CSS/web design or multi-page projects.

Pricing: Starts at £75 (~US$104) for a single design request, £299 (~US$416)/month for the standard membership

10. Undullify

If you’re working with a limited budget, Undullify’s services will likely fit the bill. Their under-$200 monthly plan includes a dedicated graphic designer, unlimited revisions and stock images. However, they only process small graphic design requests, which they define as “any design that we can create within 30 minutes.” They also have a longer three-day average turnaround time.

Pricing: Starts at US$149/month for the starter plan.

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of creative design services on the market, so picking the right tool comes down to knowing your needs and goals.

• Do you have a strict budget that you need to stay within or do you have more wiggle room?
• Are you working under tight deadlines or can you wait a couple of days to get what you need?
• Do you have consistent, ongoing design needs, or simply a single project that needs to get out the door?

Once you have a solid idea of what you need (and what would help your team/company scale), you’ll be ready to find the perfect creative design services for your organization.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Superside works, book a quick discovery call with our team! We’ll walk you through our design plans and also ask questions about your creative needs to figure out if there’s a plan that’s best for you. We definitely DO NOT take a one-fits-all approach, and instead build out teams specific to your needs.

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