For a company built on the strength of branding and marketing production, it probably seems oxymoronic to talk about design without the designer. However, the power of allowing the broader team to design without the designer cannot be overstated.
The strength of graphic designers
Graphic Designers, Creative Directors, Art Directors and their teams play an incredibly important role in bringing a brand to life and ensuring it delivers the impact and the results the organisation needs.
A good Graphic Designer understands how to move people to action through good design. They understand messaging hierarchy and how to build campaigns to deliver results.
They are adroit at manipulating colour, line, shape and typography to translate the intangible brand into the tangible branding, to deliver visually upon the brand promise, to shape expectations and experiences of the brand through their design.
Graphic design often defaults to revision and versions
The average Graphic Designer has 3 years of study and often reaches the level of Senior Graphic Designer with 5 years' experience. The average salary of a Graphic Designer is $56,000.
By the time they are a Senior Graphic Designer, they have more than 10,000 hours of experience in graphic design, probably considerably more, as many of them continue to hone their skills through freelance channels as well as through their full-time job.
Too often, however, a Graphic Designer spends time making revisions, making new versions of existing documents and trying to manage stakeholders' expectations of exactly how the brand works in practice.
Even simple revisions and new versions of documents can take days to turnaround in already busy studio teams.
For example, updating the store details, address and offer on a flyer for a new franchisee might only take 20 minutes, but with a 3 day lead-time because of existing jobs, and then another day of changes and approvals.
A good Graphic Designer is a creative problem solver - present them with an audience, an outcome and a method to reach the audience and they will deliver you meaningful and powerful solutions.
Technology allows scale
Traditionally, the software to support professional graphic design has been expensive, cumbersome and specialist. At the other end of the spectrum are very loose platforms, using generic assets and without the need for design skills (let's not talk about clip art!). There are some fantastic new platforms in the market now that make the design without the designer concept very powerful for SMEs.
If you are an established brand however, with a defined style guide, brand promise and personality and a history of beautiful, on-brand design, these platforms allow too much freedom for users. This has, in turn, meant overworked designers, frustrated clients and lengthy lead times to produce marketing collateral.
Design without the designer, using Outfit, means your stakeholders can produce on-brand collateral, without design software or experience, using only the right assets and dramatically reducing lead times.
Your brand guidelines are safe in our responsive templates and our intuitive interface ensures ease of uptake.
It means dozens, hundreds, thousands of people can create collateral without needing to bloat your design team or timelines to deliver results. Outfit is the technology that enables good, on-brand design to scale, without the heartache.
Design without the designer empowers designers
Design without the designer empowers your graphic design team to create impactful, bespoke campaigns and solutions. It empowers your graphic design team to deliver value-add items only their specialist skills can produce instead of churn and burn.
Design without the designer also empowers your broader organisation - people have the freedom to create their own collateral, on-brand and on time.
Design without the designer through the Outfit framework means your brand rules are always applied and only the right colours, images and typefaces are used.
Design without the designer isn't code to get rid of your Graphic Designer or reduce the team size. It is instead about setting designers free to deliver incredible value to your business through bespoke work while empowering your internal clients to self-service.
Design without the designer allows on brand marketing production at scale.