How To Be a One-Person “Graphics Department”

Today’s we have an interesting article written by one of our readers, Kapil, that will give you some ideas to apply to your business if you are in the position where maybe you’ve just started your freelance career or small agency and can’t yet afford a graphics designer.

I was in this position myself a few years ago and a practical guide like this one, would have been very useful to me at that time. So, let’s take a look!

This is the age of the Internet in which no business can survive unless they have a decent online presence. If you are a small-business owner, then it’s possible you are already facing a massive competition from the ecommerce giants like Amazon and eBay. However, you can turn things around by using high-quality content for your online assets.

One of the biggest challenges that small businesses face is the high costs of creating quality websites, blogs, social media content, etc. especially when it comes to graphic design. Professional graphic designers often charge exorbitantly, and finding reliable freelancers is a challenge in itself. So, what you can do is learn how to use various tools that can help you design your stuff yourself.

Becoming a One-Person “Graphics Department”

Not only it’s possible for you to become a one-person graphics department, but it’s also actually a lot easier than you may think. Let’s break it down to the main categories and you will see for yourself why this idea is both viable and affordable:

1. Logos

For many years, entrepreneurs had limited options for designing company logos.

They could either contact a reputed graphic design studio in their city which usually charged a lot and offered a terrible turnaround time for the final design (from 1-2 weeks), or they could look for freelancers on portals like Freelancer.com where the rates were affordable but the work quality often subpar.

Today, there is no such problem, thanks to logo design websites and software.

For example, Tailor Brands is a perfect tool for small businesses that want high-quality logos at affordable rates. Some of the best products use advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning which is why they are able to do most of the design work on their own.

All you have to do is let the program know what kind of logo you want and share a few details about your business. In a few minutes, you can download the final logo!

2. Memes

Memes are incredibly popular on social media and blogs, and if experts are to believe, meme marketing is here to stay.

There are two main approaches that you can take for meme marketing:

• you can either use existing memes for your content,
• or you can create your own.

Naturally, it’s best that you don’t choose the first option as popular memes are used at so many places that if you use them yourself, then you may fail to entertain your customers.

However, you can create fresh memes easily with tools like quickmeme. Not only is creating unique memes helpful in marketing, but it’s also actually quite fun too!

3. Image Editing

Graphic designing involves a lot of image-editing, and there are many tools that can make that easy and simple even if you are doing everything on your own. For instance, BeFunky is an advanced online photo collage maker and image editor which is also completely free!

BeFunky offers a variety of editing tools on an intuitive interface. You don’t even need to set up an account to get started, you can just upload the images you want to edit to get to work.

Some of the noteworthy features of BeFunky are:

• import images from your computer or Facebook account;
• dedicated apps for mobile platforms;
• use a wide range of free clip art images;
• create high-quality infographics;

4. Images

It helps to be a part of a creative community so that you can share your images and get feedback. Behance, which was acquired by Adobe in 2012, is a wonderful platform for that.

Here you can find some of the most talented graphic designers who share their portfolios and review the portfolios of others. So, you can learn a lot about graphic design here and also contact other skilled designers for your requirements.

5. Fonts

Graphic design work isn’t all about image-editing, there are lots of fonts involved too. However, if you don’t want to spend a lot of time on research every time you need a particular font, then you can simply go to www.myfonts.com.

It has a massive selection of over 130,000 unique fonts for your every requirement including vintage and modern fonts, fonts to use with Bootstrap, etc.

If you know the name of the font you are looking for, then you can find it easily on myfonts by using its search engine. Otherwise, you can check out its selection under different categories like “what’s new” and “bestsellers”, etc.

You can also purchase premium fonts at discounted prices.

6. Outsourcers

Sometimes you end up having a lot on your plate and need a helping hand. Since hiring a full-time graphics designer can be quite expensive and even impractical at times, what you can do is look for freelancer designers online. A good option to consider is DesignCrowd.

DesignCrowd is a massive marketplace for creative freelancers’ with over 500,000 graphic design professionals on the platform as of today. When you need to design a logo, business card, flyer, etc. then you can just launch a project on the platform at a price that you are comfortable with.

Based on your requirements, you can start receiving a variety of designs from skilled designers across the globe and select the winning design to close the project.

7. Animation

Sometimes, images and text aren’t enough to get your point across. In situations like these, you can focus on creating high quality and interesting videos instead. Besides, it’s really easy to grab the attention of your customers with videos against other types of content.

If you think you need years of experience with animation and video editing to create decent videos, then you will be happy to know that there are many software programs that don’t require any of that.

For instance, animaker.com is a premium online video making software that allows you to create professional-quality videos easily.

It has a massive library of videos and animation assets. Plus, you can simplify your work by choosing a video style viz. infographics, 2D, 2.5D, whiteboard, typography, etc.

Conclusion

So, as you can see, with the right tools and the right attitude, it’s possible to do all kinds of creative work by yourself. Just make sure that you check out the tools discussed above, as you’ll find most of them quite useful. Good luck!