5 Design on Demand Resources For Your Business
The design, look and feel of a product is a major determining factor in the way people purchase. Apple is the best example of design and marketing over technological innovation. Recently they have taken up arms on all fronts with technological strides but around the time of the iPod it was marketing and design that won out over more technologically advanced competitors.
Businesses of all sizes have a continuous need for resources when they don’t have the budget for it. Design is one of the areas that often gets left on the back burner to focus on other pieces. The design of a product image or a website in general can have a heavy effect on the initial reaction of a visitor and that effect will continue throughout the customer funnel you’ve created.
Hiring a full time designer is a costly endeavour that few businesses can afford, to subside the need for high quality design at reasonable pricing, we’ve rounded up a handful of design on demand services. Some of these services are even automated based on information you give them about your business!
Tailor
Tailor is algorithm based design platform that uses text input to generate logos and branding identity packages. It’s a quick 2 minute, 6 step process of entering in your company name and branding words that leads to 6 logo options.
You start with entering your company name and tagline, followed by a description of what your company does along with a word to describe the design you are after. Then it gets into the overall styling of the brand where you decide on an icon based brand, name based or letter based icon. In the case of Vantage, we opted for an icon style design so we can compare the results to our existing branding. The best part about this step in the process is the ability to search and choose the icon you like. That way the fonts and design follow the icon style.
Now you get moved into a series of questions to analyze the style you are after. Tailor does this by showing sets of logos and having you choose one or the other.
After this process, the system should understand your taste in terms of simple or complex design. The result is a set of logos that have a match percentage based on the questions asked. A nice touch is the ability to customize a design. If it isn’t quite what you wanted, you can easily modify the design to fit.
Here are our results:
With some tweaking I ended up with a logo that isn’t too far off from the real thing:
Considering the cost of the end logo file starts at $24 for the simple PNG it’s a great deal. At the top end, for just $99 you get a vector version of the logo, a full set of document designs (business card, letterhead and more), social graphics, email signature and even brand guidelines!
Design Pickle
Design Pickle takes a bit of a different approach to making a design request by offering a set monthly fee for as much design as you require. For $195 per month Design Pickle offers you as many graphic design requests as you need with the only catch being that a request should be about 30 minutes of work.
What can be done in 30 minutes you might ask, well here’s a quick list:
- Customize your business cards
- Update your logo
- Create a meme image
- Make a t-shirt design
- Create Facebook ad images
- Revamp your brochure
- Revamp your sales material graphics
- Design stickers
- Resize and/or retouch images
- Convert photos to a variety of formats
- Create a vector from your non-vector image
- Mockup some new ad ideas
- Mockup a website
- Resize your images or graphics
- Design a sales flyer
- Make your email signature look spiffy
- Design a badge for your next event or website
- Design custom stationary
- Color correct photos or graphics
- Standardize your blog header image for every post
- Find unique blog images
That list is just a start, there is a lot more you can do in 30 minutes with an experienced designer at your fingertips. That’s under $2,500 per year for having a designer on demand to handle the tasks that most small businesses just can’t handle in-house.
SketchDeck
SketchDeck is a relatively new design on demand startup that takes the project approach to offering design. SketchDeck offers project based design that can get started in minutes and has an average turn around time of 12 hours.
It’s definitely not the lowest cost option but with infographic designs as low as $400 and landing page designs as low as $600, it’s affordable enough for most businesses.
It takes a few minutes to get started and with the ability to have as many projects on the go as needed, it’s a great option.
99Design
99Designs as famous for being one of the first contest based design on demand services. The whole idea is that you put up a prize, the amount you are willing to spend for your design request, and designers from around the globe submit their designs in the hopes of winning the prize.
Let’s say you needed a banner ad designed to promote the new products you have in stock. For $199 you could have upwards of 30 designs to choose from and when you choose your winner, you become the full copyright owner of the final design.
It’s especially good for when you only have a vague idea of what you want the end result to look like. With all the options you are bound to find one that works.
99Designs has also expanded it’s offering into quick design on demand work. If you have a design task that you need done, tweaking of your logo or turning an image into a vector for example, 99Designs now offers to take on these tasks for $19 and complete them within an hour!
Imagine having a product you want to get live for Black Friday but you need to make it stand out. You can easily submit your request to 99Designs and have it back in less than an hour so you are ready to sell. If you buy in bulk you can also get the per task cost down to $11, which is very low cost by any standards.
Fiverr
Recently I had the request to get a product video that covered off what the product was and why people would want to use it. With the timeline set to a maximum of 1 week to deliver, I scoured the internet in search of agencies and other companies that could help. In the end I ended up on Fiverr to see what I could get that would be reasonable. As it turns out, Fiverr was the best option. In 7 days at a cost of $200 I had a great looking product video that included a voiceover and several revisions. The best part was it looked just like an example video from one of the companies that wanted to charge me $1,500.
Fiverr is essentially the ultimate anything on demand website. Everything from video testimonials to logo design and more, all starting at $5.
Just within the Logo Design section of Fiverr, there are over 2,500 offers to design a logo and deliver it within 24 hours. The quality admittedly is not the same as a custom designed product from a professional graphic designer, but if you are just starting out or need some quick graphic work done, Fiverr shines brightly as a beacon of hope.
Bonus for the DIYer: Canva
For the DIY designer that doesn’t have Photoshop and just wants something quick and easy, I present Canva. Not only is it a quick, easy, browser based designer but it also has a large library of templates to choose from across multiple graphic types (Facebook posts, Instagram posts, Powerpoint presentations, Facebook covers & so much more).
This is one of the pre-designed images they have ready to go for Facebook:
With designs like that at just $1 to download as a high quality image, what more do you need?
Have your own go-to design on demand service, let us know in the comments!
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Lightboard is a Marketing Design on Demand service. All projects are led by an experienced account manager, and our designers are 100% U.S. based. We aren’t a crowdsourced model – all of our designers have worked with us across multiple projects, and our account managers match you with the designer that is the best match to get your project done correctly and on-time. http://lightboard.io (disclosure: I work for Lightboard)
Flocksy launched around the same time as Design Pickle and offers on demand graphic design and website help for a low monthly payment. The nice thing about Flocksy is that when you don’t have a lot of design projects you can use them to update or build a website.