With the steady rise of a freelance economy, outsourcing has become popular and widespread for many businesses worldwide including graphic designers.
An opportunity to grow your business by reducing operating costs and increasing the quality of services seems to be very appealing to enterprises.
While some companies are happy with their outsourcing experience, it’s not always the best experience for all parties involved. It’s essential that there is a good fit between client company and outsourcer, culturally and professionally.
Various reviews, both positive and negative, posted on outsourcing platforms may lead to confusion over your decision to contract work to a 3rd party.
The big question is – should you consider maintaining an in-house staff of graphic designers, or should you bring in freelancers to handle the designing work for you?
Let’s delve into the pros and cons of outsourcing to find out the answer. But to get a better understanding of the problem, let’s first identify the difference between the two.
What Is Outsourcing?
Outsourcing refers to contracting out a complete business operation, a project, or some particular activities to an external provider affiliated with the hiring company.
While outsourcing, you can hire the specialists you need on either an hourly basis or a fixed salary, according to the project requirements.
What’s Insourcing, Then?
The In-house technique, also known as insourcing, refers to performing functions, business processes, or projects with internal resources. It also includes full-time local graphic designers at hand, with a regular salary and different employment perks and benefits.
Now, let’s look over the pros and cons of outsourcing graphic designers.
Pros:
Cost Advantage
Lots of companies consider outsourcing as an efficient cost-cutting tool. Statistics say that experienced freelance graphic designers from western countries charge between $65 and $150 per hour.
The average hourly wage of newbies or offshore graphic designers ranges from $20 to $50 per hour. Famous graphic designers charge much more.
According to Indeed, the average salary for in-house junior graphic designers in New York City is about $42,000. Senior graphic designers make around $74,000, and design directors’ salaries are about $137,000 on average.
Now let’s look at the breakdown of what goes into keeping in-house designers:
- Hiring/Onboarding
- Overhead salaries
- Infrastructure costs
- Employee benefits
- Training costs
A company can reduce the cost of keeping in-house graphic designers up to 60% thanks to outsourcing.
All of this seems like a good reason to collaborate with someone who can do design work remotely rather than having pricy in-house expertise.
Focus On Core Competency
Corporate and business functions — such as human resources, information technology, manufacturing, marketing, finance, procurement, legal, transportation, logistics, and facilities management are essential to almost every organization.
However, not all of these are “core” to the enterprise. If a business function doesn’t offer a competitive advantage over its competitors, it is not in the company’s interest to maintain it.
So, if a company isn’t directly involved in the graphic design industry, including web design, advertising, print production, corporate branding, etc., outsourcing helps concentrate on core activities.
Labor Flexibility
A company may need a team of graphic designers to work on a particular project. It would be more than infeasible to hire people for only a few weeks or months.
Outsourcing freelance experts only when needed offers an excellent opportunity to get the work done by professionals while avoiding the hassle of employee onboarding and long-term commitments.
Lack Of Talent
The graphic design industry is evolving rapidly due to emerging technologies. But not every designer is very enthusiastic about upgrading their skills according to arising trends.
As a result, there could be a shortage of top-notch designers who have a good command of the Adobe Creative Suite or other designing software. Having an average designer who lacks competency is an unjustified expense.
How About The Outsourcing Cons?
Lack Of Control
Many things can go wrong when outsourcing your graphic design to an external company. One of them is being unaware of the project’s status.
To avoid this, use advanced collaboration platforms that can prevent a failed outsourcing relationship. Using just Zoom or Slack isn’t enough.
Depending on your project’s needs, you can give a try to Cage, Droplr, Filestage, Binfire, or Basecamp. These tools help with communication, project management, and tracking while giving you peace of mind.
Quality Concerns
Before the coronavirus outbreak, individual companies avoided outsourcing just because of quality concerns.
However, the ongoing crises have helped many of us realize that outsourcing is comfortable and sustainable. The belief that only that team that collaborates on a project under the same roof can work efficiently is no longer valid.
It all depends on your project’s scope and how much you’re willing to spend on outsourcing. You can handle some projects better internally, where you can monitor the quality closely.
Still, both outsourcing and in-house graphic designers can produce excellent, high-quality work.
Final Recommendations
If you choose the outsourcing route, how can you find a result-driven graphic designer passionate about what they do? Having a great plan behind your product or your services is a must if you want to succeed.
Next, go to Upwork and find a designer you need in a few clicks. You can also explore the contest platforms that specialize in graphic design – DesignCrowd, 99designs, DesignHill, Crowdspring, and Dribbble.
These sites have proved themselves very handy when it comes to small short-terms freelance projects. And if you are interested in building a team of graphic designers who are willing to work on long-term projects, look no further than at Outsourcely.
And if you happen to be a graphic designer yourself, use a Graphic Design Proposal to secure a project. A professionally made proposal template significantly increases your chance of getting a project awarded in most cases.
Don’t be afraid to outsource your graphic design work to a freelancer or an agency. Just play it smart, research, and do due diligence, and you might be pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to get great graphic design work done.
