When it comes to your money, time, and ultimately, your marketing success, which is the better hire, a design agency or a freelance graphic designer?

The Value of Team Creativity

With 28 years of freelance experience within our Eyedea Design Agency team, we appreciate freelancing and the tenacity and dedication it takes. However, creatively, each of us have found after transitioning from solo work to teamwork that the age-old adage is true: Two brains are better than one.

“…group members tend to build off one another’s ideas, leading to increased creativity and innovation.” – The American Psychological Association, The Science of Creativity

After years of experience on our own, we see that ideas take shape more quickly and build in power and effectiveness when brainstorming occurs together as a team.

The lower cost of hiring a freelance designer might be tempting, but you may be paying for less creativity in the long run. The freelance designer only draws from one well of ideas. Agency creative work brings a team of minds together to create the best concept. If a marketing campaign was a diamond of an idea it would take multiple cuts to be its best. A freelancer only cuts from one perspective. However, a creative a team can cut from many angles to develop the very best creative assets for your multi-faceted marketing strategy.  You get a better result and potentially a shorter turn-around time on a final product.

“Collaboration is like carbonation for fresh ideas. Working together bubbles up ideas you would not have come up with solo, which gets you further faster.” – Caroline Ghosn

We saw this proven recently in our rebranding process of A Place to Be. Two designers ended up meshing their ideas to create a branding concept that was greater than the sum of their parts on their own. The entire design team critiqued and reviewed the campaign and the rebranding became a team effort.

The cost of an agency may seem higher but pays off in the increased creativity you receive from a team effort. The proofing process between designer and client can also be reduced if the agency has a review process that runs through many hands before it goes to a client for review. This in itself can save you time and money.

More Reliable in the Long Run

Long term relationships with a design agency provide stability in executing your marketing plans. If your freelance designer is unavailable when you need them, you could be left scrambling to find qualified talent to complete your projects.  For example, we have a client whose freelance website designer—working overseas—just disappeared after years of the customer relying on them for support.  Another freelancer became ill and was no longer able to field a client’s projects, leaving them to find a new designer that would have to be educated on the fly.

That’s not the case with a design agency. Someone is always available to fill in to complete a project. Eyedea has weekly team meetings where each designer shares the status of their projects with the rest of the team. Your project doesn’t rest on one person’s shoulders but a team’s, ensuring jobs don’t fall through the cracks and your critical deadlines are met.

Creativity and Constant Learning:

The world of design is constantly changing; technology advances, trends evolve into new trends, new forms of media are made available. Graphic design professionals need to be continually learning and improving their craft. Eyedea designers are eager to explore new ways of doing their job and are just as eager to share what they learn with their teammates. This sharing of knowledge helps an agency exponentially increase its collective knowledge base far above what each designer could achieve on their own. The agency designer is in the pressure cooker of constant learning. Being critiqued from client feedback, feedback from the other designers on the team and the art directors who oversee it all.

The Value of a Design Agency

Although it may appear more cost effective to hire a freelance designer, you may find better value with a design agency through superior creativity and reliability, and the stability of a relationship with a team of design professionals.