Design agencies vs. Design employees
An old friend emailed me a few weeks ago to ask about hiring a designer.
It felt a little bit strange to answer a serious question about business decisions from someone I met in elementary school. My friend asked one of the big questions that the technical world has been arguing over for years: when you need design work, is it better to hire an employee or pay an agency?
My friend works at a venture capital firm that works with small businesses. Many of these small businesses need design work done but aren’t entirely sure how to enlist a designer.
She wrote,
We're trying to encourage a lot of [companies] to hire designers or outsource design work, but I actually don't know all that much about how to do that well. What should you look for in a candidate? Is it crucial to get someone who can also code? How much better is it if you bring someone in-house vs. use a design firm?
It’s way too early in the day for me to tackle the eternal dilemma of whether or not designers should code. Here are some of my thoughts on how to choose between hiring a designer or drawing up a contract with an agency.
When to use an agency
Design agencies are an excellent resource if your project needs a team of specialists for a relatively short project. It may be virtually impossible – or at least very expensive – to hire a single employee who can design, code and produce interactive content for a website. The agency I work with keeps multiple UX designers, graphic designers, animators and developers on staff. Hiring an agency will give you the benefit of several careers’ worth of experience in a broad range of fields.
Agencies are often the most cost-effective choice for small businesses outside of the tech industry. Local restaurants, real estate agents and retail stores probably don’t need a full-time designer. If you’re primarily a brick-and-mortar business, chances are your needs for a website are fairly straightforward. An agency can deliver a polished marketing and ecommerce site quickly and your small business will have exhausted its current need for design.
When to hire a designer
If you're building what you hope to be a lasting, useful and lucrative digital product then you need to hire a designer. This may seem like a painfully obvious statement but I've lost count of how many messages I receive on LinkedIn asking me to "fix our site's UX" on a 6-month contract. There are in fact companies that sell consumer-focused products who do not have a designer of their own.
I interviewed with one such company once, and asked "so who designs the interfaces?" The CEO looked embarrassed and said "We usually just have the front-end guy figure it out." I should have ran screaming from the building.
Anyway! You should hire a designer when your product has ongoing design needs. A designer doesn't just exist to pick colors and push pixels, you know. The designer is the intermediary between development and customer requests.A designer can help structure your site in a way that makes sense to humans. A designer can test which pages are performing well, suggest improvements and remove pain points for your customers.
... But I'm a little bit biased.
You might think that, as a designer who works at an agency, I'd encourage all companies to hire an agency. But I believe that more companies directly hiring more designers can only be a good thing. Design talent shouldn't be silo-d out in agencies, it should be free to go make the world a more beautiful place.