Outsourcing 101: Finding a Branding Design Agency That Gets Your Vision

Brand design is one of the most crucial investments a business makes. Beyond the logo and signature brand imagery, brand design is all about translating your business’s vision, values, and personality into a solid visual language that resonates with your audience. That’s why choosing the right creative partner matters so much. The right branding design agency brings your ideas to life, creating a consistent identity that works across every channel, every customer touchpoint. 

But the real challenge arises when you start comparing your options. Because the options are endless! There are numerous branding design agencies, all with similar service scopes, but what works well for other businesses might not always work for your brand. The best creative partner for your brand designs depends on your goals, your budget, stage of growth, and your target audience, among other things. 

So, how do you figure out which agency to collaborate with? That’s what this blog is all about. By the time you are done reading this post, you’ll have a clear idea of what to look for and how to confidently choose a branding design agency that’s right for you.

Let’s get started, shall we? 

Why Branding Design Matters Now More Than Ever

Branding design elements like logo, colors, typography, brand visuals, mascot design, etc, have always been considered pivotal to a brand’s growth. But in the digital-first era, as AI has revolutionized the way teams tackle design requirements, the role of branding design is evolving. In a nutshell, it matters now more than ever. But why? 

To begin with, the rising competition. A few decades ago, shopping meant choosing between two or three brands, but now consumers have endless options in almost all categories. In addition to this, from about 44.4% of industries being highly concentrated in 1994 to just 36.6% in 2019, the variety or diversity across industries has expanded. Standing out in such a crowded market requires a strong brand identity. 

Moreover, brand personality has become a strong driver of customer sentiments. Data shows that about 57.5% of consumers are likely to purchase from brands with a strong personality. What better than your branding designs to represent your brand’s personality?

Finally, a clear brand design strategy is all about ensuring consistency. When you have a robust branding design system, it gets easier to cohesively represent your brand across touchpoints. This is important considering that branding consistency is known to help about 33% of businesses boost their revenue by nearly 20%. 

To sum it up, branding design holds a much higher value now more than ever! 

Brand Design Challenges in the Digital Era 

Having established that brand designs are much more important now, let’s talk about a few challenges that brands face when tackling brand design requirements in the digital era. 

• Since AI tools are very common now, brands find it easy to design creatives, but the real difficulty shows up when it comes to maintaining originality and a human touch. 
• With the ever-increasing exposure to creativity, design trends are highly volatile. From visual styles to typography, trends in design change faster than usual. Brands might therefore find these trends tough to keep up with. 
• Brands today have to appear on diverse channels and create an omnichannel presence. Therefore, their brand identity needs to be scalable and adaptable to diverse channels. 
• Designing for diverse multi-generational audiences can be tough. 
• Maintaining authenticity in a digital-first world is not easy. 

All of these challenges can add a strain on internal teams, and not all brands are equipped with the resources to handle them. Some might not have an internal design team, and others might have a small one that is already juggling campaigns and internal corporate communication design. It’s during such times that outsourcing to a branding design agency feels like a practical move! 

Find out more about the changing value of design for brands in our blog here. 

Hiring the Right Branding Design Agency – The Ultimate Checklist

Having decided that outsourcing your branding designs is the strategic move your brand needs, the main challenge at hand is to compare your options and find the right branding design agency. 

You might already be aware of the basics like:

• Understanding the scope of services 
• Comparing the plans and pricing 
• Evaluating the portfolio 
• Exploring the clientele 
• And looking for the agency’s reviews from previous clients 

But that only covers the foundation. When it comes to branding designs, you need to dig a little deeper to understand the agencies shortlisted and find the right creative partner who will help shape your brand’s identity. Let’s talk about a few such nuances to look out for. 

1. Does the agency understand and create designs for the target audience? 

Great visuals mean very little if they don’t connect with the people you’re trying to reach. Design choices that resonate well with Gen Z might not click with millennials or Baby Boomers. Data shows that 81% of consumers expect brands to understand them. This should reflect in your brand designs. 

Taking all this into account, look for branding design agencies that have not only worked in diverse industries but also worked on designs targeting diverse audience demographics. 

Scour through their portfolios, take a closer look at their previous projects – perhaps their case studies. Have they handled organizations with similar audience demographics as yours? How well have they translated the expectations of the specific demographic into the designs? 

2. A branding design agency that builds brand narrative, not just design 

In other words, look for an agency that excels at visual storytelling. When you look at the designs created by the agency, do not just look at the aesthetics. With the advanced creativity tools available in the market today, anyone can create a “good-looking” design. But not everyone can create a design that talks directly to the audience instead of talking at them. It’s that kind of excellence you need, especially when creating brand designs. 

So, when you scroll through the designs in their portfolio, check whether the branding design agency has been able to create designs that evoke strong emotions. Designs that tell a story without too much text. From the choice of color schemes for the mood to the imagery integrated into the design, every single element should have been intentionally included to tell a clear and relatable story. This is the kind of agency that should be handling designs that represent your brand’s story. This is the kind of branding design agency that will be able to create a brand identity that instantly differentiates your brand in a crowded market.

3. The agency should be able to deliver cross-platform consistency 

Gone are the days when offline businesses could stick to offline advertising and online businesses chose only the digital channels for marketing. Today, an omnichannel presence has become a must-have. So, one of the most crucial details to consider when hiring a branding design agency is to check if they can create brand designs that scale well and adapt to multiple channels. Better yet, can they help create designs for diverse channels, too? 

This is one of the areas where some agencies fail. They might be experts in logo design, but social media design might be out of their scope. So, when they create a brand identity, there are limited options to iterate and evaluate whether the designed identity will work well on other channels. And whether the chosen brand identity can act as the foundation when designing other marketing visuals. 

In fact, this is one of the areas where working with an unlimited design service makes perfect sense. Since your subscription covers everything from logo design to packaging, social media designs to billboards, you can work with your dedicated design team to carefully craft branding designs that translate well across channels and later create designs that look consistent and tell your story cohesively. 

When in doubt, get in touch with the branding design agency and ask them about projects where they worked on designs for omnichannel campaigns. 

4. Check if the agency can handle complex design projects

Branding design is not about finding a catchy template and swapping a few colors and text. Some designers and design agencies might be experts in creating designs with stock elements, but might not necessarily have the resources to support more complicated requests – like custom illustrations designed from scratch. Or even character design for your mascot. But these are valuable in branding design. 

For example, if you are sure that you need a mascot for your brand and that your brand mascot and logo should be visually connected, then the chosen branding design agency should have the capacity and track record of having handled complex design projects. 

This ensures that you are working with a creative partner who can help bring all your ideas to life, just the way you want them. Most importantly, this ensures that your brand designs are truly yours and not like rip-offs of what’s already there in your industry. 

5. Support for AI-ready workflows

AI is no longer the future – it’s the present. Moreover, love it or hate it, it has become a pivotal part of design workflows. So, resisting it and keeping AI away from your brand design workflow will only make your effort feel outdated. 

Accordingly, when comparing branding design agencies, look for those who are up-to-date with technological advancements in the creative segment. This isn’t about using an AI tool to generate your designs but rather understanding the ins and outs of the technology that will help them stretch the perceived limits of creativity and create nothing but the best for your brand. 

• Do they have AI-ready workflows? 
• Perhaps even support in-house AI-powered features and tools that will make your brand design process smoother and more productive? 
• Or maybe the agency uses AI to reduce bottlenecks and speed up the process by automating the mundane? 

If the design agency is far ahead of its competitor when it comes to leveraging AI for productivity, you do not have to go hunting for more AI tools for creativity. 

In contrast, agencies that are still lagging when it comes to adopting AI technology might be missing out on a lot. Eventually, this leads to your brand having to settle for less than what’s normal in the world of design. 

From AI-powered requests that save your time to AI-generated voiceovers, did you know that KIMP integrates AI into your design workflow to boost your productivity? 

6. Who owns your designs? 

Questions about design ownership is something many organizations miss when sealing the deal with design agencies. In some cases, the designer or design agency provides you with the completed design but retains ownership of the design. Scrutinize the terms of the contract to understand if there are license issues that stop you from manipulating the designs received. 

If that’s the case, the arrangement might not be practical, particularly when creating brand designs. Therefore, when choosing a branding design agency, look for one that gives you full ownership of all the designs created and also provides you with the source files. This means that they give you fully editable design source files for all your designs so that you are fully in control of what you do with those designs now or in the future. 

Because without source files, your brand is effectively locked in. If you want to make updates down the line, say, adjust your color palette, tweak typography, or adapt a logo for a new market, you’ll be forced to return to the same agency and pay for edits. That dependency might not show up immediately, but it becomes a major pain point when your brand scales.

7. The convenience of managing revisions 

In many cases, the cost of the project covers the design but not the revisions. The designer or design agency might accommodate a limited number of revisions, after which every change to your design means paying extra. Freezing your design in just a couple of iterations is not easy, especially with brand designs like logos or even packaging. Given the fact that a lot is lost in translation when working with an external team, it’s important to evaluate the flexibility of revisions. 

Choose a branding design agency that supports convenient revisions to your designs without any hidden costs. Most unlimited design agencies support unlimited revisions, meaning that you can keep tweaking your design until you think it perfectly captures your vision. 

In addition to the support for unlimited revisions, you should also consider the ease of giving feedback. If the team cannot understand your feedback or if communicating your feedback feels tedious, it can get frustrating. 

Did you know that KIMP360 (our project management platform) comes with a custom feedback tool that lets you “point, click and share” feedback? 

8. Proof of long-term partnerships 

Having served multiple clients is good, but having retained many is even better. Look for proof of long-term partnerships. This tells a lot about the branding design agency because clients who come back for more do so only because they like both the quality of design and the quality of experience the first time. 

In general, any agency can pull off one-time projects, but not many can deliver as promised and keep clients returning to them for their future projects. These are the kinds of agencies you need for your branding designs. 

Because when it comes to brand designs, you cannot work with a different freelancer or agency for your logo, a different designer or agency for your mascot, and then hunt for a design agency that can help complete the rest of your brand design system. And these designs do not happen all at once. So, look for branding design agencies that can handle a variety of brand design categories and do so reliably. 

From case studies, portfolios, and most importantly, reviews and customer testimonials, understand whether there is evidence of the chosen agency holding long-term clients for months, if not years. 

9. Seamless project management 

Brand designs consolidate the essence of your brand into a handful of visuals. That’s no easy feat. Naturally, it’s often not just about sharing a simple design brief and getting a finished design. There is a lot of communication that happens in between. From sharing your brand’s existing assets to brand guidelines if you have them already (or creating them), and clearly communicating your vision to your design team, it’s a long and tedious process. So, look for branding design agencies that help simplify it. 

Even the best designers cannot deliver designs on time if there is no clear workflow. Hence, what you really need is an agency with a clearly defined plan of action for project management – a transparent and easy-to-monitor workflow. 

For instance, at KIMP, we have our in-house project management tool called KIMP360. From creating your requests to tracking progress, accessing your files, and getting in touch with your design team, everything happens on this centralized hub. So, any time you want updates, you have them right in front of you. 

10. Timelines and timeliness 

One final detail to pay attention to when outsourcing your brand designs is the timeline. Remember that time is money, especially in brand design workflows. Moreover, unexpected delays can often lead to cascading effects and expensive bottlenecks. Therefore, look for a branding design agency that defines clear project timelines and a proven track record of timeliness. 

Again, online reviews are your best bet. Are past clients of the chosen agency talking about delays in project deliveries? Or are they happy about timely design delivery? 

While reviews help understand their timeliness, you should also evaluate their timelines. What’s quick for one brand might not be so for your brand. Considering your project timelines and deadlines, compare the chosen agency’s turnaround times for different types of designs. 

Discuss with the team and get a rough estimate of the delivery times and know whether there are options to change priorities of your design projects midway when something changes. An additional detail to check will be the number of active projects supported, especially if you are working with an unlimited design service like KIMP. KIMP supports 2 active requests with both KIMP Graphics and KIMP Video plans and 4 active requests with the KIMP Graphics + Video plan. This number almost doubles when you choose our enterprise plans. 

Did you know that you can easily view the current progress and rearrange priorities directly on your board within KIMP360? 

Secure Your Brand’s Future With the Right Creative Partner 

The right branding design agency is a strategic investment for your brand. Because the right agency helps bring your ideas to life and establish your brand’s unique personality in a volatile market. Ready to bypass the tedious designer vetting process and complex contracts that come with traditional design agency collaboration? Choose an unlimited design service, like KIMP! 

Not sure which subscription is right for you? Schedule a 1:1 call with the KIMP team today!