Our Comprehensive Guide On Hiring Brand Design Experts

In this guide, you’ll learn what qualities you should look for in your brand design experts, how to choose and hire them, and some practical advice on managing your working relationship with them once you’ve started, including some detail on pricing and project management. 

We’ve also created a more specific guide on Rebranding if you’re preparing for a rebrand and want to hire a team of experts.

How to choose your brand design experts

The right brand design partners will show three qualities that set them apart from the competition.

How creative and imaginative are they?

Firstly, they will have a strong creative spirit. This can be evidenced in a number of ways, but most effectively you can look at their rebranding portfolio or client base.

If you can see from their list of previous and current clients that they’ve already worked with a range of brands, particularly in and outside of  your sector – this will show that they have wide experience, can think outside the box and draw from learnings in different fields. For example, here at Self we’ve worked with an Adventure App (Teleporting), a Georgian diner (Bani Gani), a legal tech data company (BeCivil), a kids gaming product (Kanjo Games), and a lock manufacturer (Apecs Locks).

Each of these projects has taught us a variety of lessons and forced us to examine brand from a new perspective. Different industries have different pressure points, customers have wide ranging needs.

Will they let you talk to their clients about their experiences? A good brand partner will let those clients proudly show off their work. 

Are they passionate about words and visuals (both extremely important in building a strong brand!), or simply one or the other?

You can also gauge their creative spirit from the energy in your initial talks with them. Do they already have ideas for your brand and are they willing to share them?

How well do they manage and organise a project?

Secondly, they should have great organisation skills. A brand design project combines a lot of moving parts, especially when the branding is to be incorporated across products, online platforms, marketing materials, packaging, and social channels. What system do they use to manage a large project? What is their approach to deadlines and target timings? Will they set out KPIs and how do they plan to assess the ongoing success of the brand design? (More on this last part later…)

For example, in our packaging rebranding projects we explore the different factors that feed into a change of packaging: regulations, packaging supplies, cost break points, alignment across stores, customer buy-in, consistency across web platforms. A good partner needs to make sure nothing is missed.

Do they buy into your company values?

Thirdly, they should genuinely buy in to your company’s vision and values. Any good working relationship relies on the right creative tension. Your brand partner will present you with strong ideas but place their own opinions secondary to the ethos of your brand. To take a specific example; if one of the core values of your company is that simplicity is paramount, your ideal brand partner won’t push a design that is complex and intricate just because it’s a really strong idea in itself. To do otherwise would be approaching it from their point of view, not yours.

What pricing for brand design packages should I expect?

The first obvious question you have to ask yourself is how does a studio price their work? Are they charging an hourly rate, with an estimate for how long the work will take? Or do they provide you with the certainty and consistency of a project-based fee? 

Depending on where you look online, a UK full rebranding could cost anywhere between £5,000 and £25,000. Larger e-commerce businesses can be quoted six or seven figure sums for products with substantial market reach. Pricing depends on a number of factors, including how big or established the designers are, where they’re based (e.g. London vs regional agencies), the complexity of the project, the size of your company (yes this is relevant - because more exposure means more value added which means a higher price tag).

Obviously if your project is more basic or specific (e.g. simply a logo design), you can spend a lot less (as little as £30 on a site like Fiverr); but branding is a subtle art that has huge implications for your long-term growth, and is far more than simply having a sleek logo.

Your main question is whether you want to hire a big-name agency, which will minimise the risk of problems during the campaign and also provide somewhere for the blame to land if the branding project receives widespread negative press, but comes at a high premium.

Our best piece of advice here is to work out whether an agency is smart, dedicated, and creative, rather than paying for a big established name agency. With good due diligence, you should be able to find a brand agency that delivers high quality and good service at a great value price point.

And obviously it goes without saying that you should work with agencies that have skilled designers in-house, rather than outsourcing. The more layers of outsourcing that are involved, the more dependencies are introduced which can lead to communication failures and a loss of ‘connection’ to the originators of the project – you.

How to build a good working relationship

As specialists on the other side of the relationship, we at Self have a number of pieces of advice that will help you get the best out of your brand design experts.

Trust their expertise

This is not the same as signing off on any decision without considering its long term strategy implications. But remember that you’re paying experts not because you want to tell them what to do, but because of their deeper understanding of how branding works. It may seem like an obvious point but many companies get it wrong!

To borrow an example from our Growth team; it’s amazing how often companies will want their existing website and articles search engine “optimised”, rather than wanting new, targeted content created to supply existing demand.

Have clear, achievable but ambitious KPIs

Timings and deadlines are obviously key, but you’ll also want to set out some metrics by which you can measure the success of your branding launch. For example, you could aim for an uptick in sales or social media interaction, or increased positive press coverage

Keep assessing the success of your campaign together

The relationship doesn’t end after the launch. Keep assessing its ingoing success using the metrics above. The right brand design partners will want to proactively do this themselves, and to check in on how your company is growing post-launch, judging whether any tweaks are required. 

Strike the right balance between managing and control

Give your branding partners space to breathe. As long as both sides are aligned in terms of timelines and KPIs and as long as you’re regularly checking in on them, you don’t need to micromanage the process.

Creatives are special creatures; they need space for the ideas to flow, but once they do things can move very quickly!  

Rebranding: some final thoughts…

Hiring brand design experts can seem daunting, like you’re placing the fate of your precious brand in their hands. Especially considering the scale of budget involved, it’s something you’ll want to get right.

But if you ask yourself the questions above and take the time to judge whether you think the agency employs smart and organised people who will place your company values at the heart of their processes, you’ll be delighted with the results!

And, as always, at Self we’re happy to help you in more detail with the process. You can get in touch with us here for advice or for a project quote.

Thanks for reading, and good luck with your brand design project! If you're interested in re-brand, take a look at our portfolio.