Hiring Graphic Designers: A Modern Guide for Scaling Teams
Strong branding used to be a differentiator. Today, it's the cost of entry.
Modern giants such as Starbucks and fast-growing companies such as Lovable have one thing in common: great design. We’ve learned that design builds trust before a single word is read. Did you know brands perceived as innovative grow 7x faster than others?
With design, you can make your product feel polished, new, and exciting. But how do you define great design? Better yet, how can you know who can bring you incredible design?
Hiring graphic designers is still one of the most elusive processes in creative operations.
With this guide, we’ll teach you how to find the best graphic designers in the business with no headaches. It doesn’t matter whether you’re at startups, scaleups, or enterprises looking to scale design output, grow businesses, or launch projects.
Step 1: Start with understanding what you need
Despite the advancements in design understanding, companies lump all designers together, struggle to vet portfolios, or burn months of revenue bouncing between unreliable freelancers and expensive agencies. Never more!
One of the key mistakes in hiring is not understanding the scope of your needs. If you don’t understand what type of designer or even which project that designer will handle, chances are you’ll regret your hiring choice.
Hiring the wrong type of designer is often more expensive than not hiring at all. It can cost up to 3x the amount of their salary alone.
Before posting a job listing for a designer, go through this quick checklist:
- Is this a one-time project or an ongoing need?
- Do you need generalists or specialists?
- What kind of turnaround time will be expected?
- Is design a bottleneck in another team’s workflow (e.g., marketing or product)?
Checklist for Understanding Graphic Designers' Needs
1. Is this a one-time project or an ongoing need?
This will inform whether or not you need a part-time or full-time designer. For many fast-growing companies that need to compete with competitors with speed of output, a full-time hire is a good idea. You must manage blog assets, website assets, social media creatives, newsletters, email collateral, rebrands, and more.
Enterprises and scaleups, which usually already have an established design team, need part-time help to unclog their workflow and deliver projects that their designers couldn't, even with the Shadow Clone Technique.
2. Do you need generalists or specialists?
This one pondering gets a lot of hiring managers off guard. Sometimes, the answer is both, and other times, it's unclear at the moment. But you have to ask yourself: What is the most crucial project that we have, and does it need the absolute best to deliver it?
Many times, specialists will simply deliver better than generalists. You don’t want to risk hiring a graphic designer who never did branding to re-do your brand’s identity, even if they’re incredibly talented at social media creatives, thumbnails, and packaging design.
Right now, you need to forget about the cost. We’ll explore this later. Consider the ideal team you’d need for your company's creative process and communication reach.
3. What kind of turnaround time will be expected?
Now, onto another big friction point between designers and stakeholders with a non-design background. The turnaround time for a project. Here’s a simple way to break it down:
- What’s the longest it can take and still work out?
- What’s the ideal timeline?
- What’s the fastest timeline you want?
The answer for the best turnaround time is expected to be in the middle of these three timeframes.
Let’s say you’re part of a scaleup and want a new brand identity in the fastest delivery at 3 days, but ideally you’d want to get a well-thought-out design that lasts for a long time, then it’d be okay to take about 1 month, but taking 3 months would be almost outrageous.
Your expected turnaround for that particular project is between one month and two. If you’re fast with the feedback, already have the look and feel in mind, and maybe have references, then you’d start to cut back on the time.
Every design project has to strike a balance between care, quality, consistency, and an acceptable deliverable timeline for a business. So, work with the designer and align that delivery timeline before committing to a deadline.
4. Is design a bottleneck in another team’s workflow (e.g., marketing or product)?
Here’s where the real difference-maker presents itself. Design is often seen as something nice to have, but in reality, it’s crucial for teams in marketing and product.
So, suppose your product team can’t release features fast enough because of design constraints, and your marketing team cannot reach audiences across channels and capture attention. How will your business ever grow?
Understanding the differences in branding refresh, ongoing content design, app UI, motion graphics, and others is essential. The difference isn't just operational. It requires an entirely different set of skills.
This quick checklist can save you tens of thousands in misalignment costs.
Step 2: Choose between in-house, freelance, and agencies
Businesses typically consider three primary avenues for design talent:
- In-house designers: offering consistent brand alignment and task delivery, but come with higher overhead costs and time-to-fill.
- Freelancers: providing flexibility but may lack long-term commitment and consistency. A Remote report found the primary problem business owners have with freelancers is consistency.
- Agencies: delivering comprehensive services, but can be expensive and less adaptable to rapid changes.
Each model has its merits, but they may not always align with the dynamic needs of modern businesses. However, all of them suffer from speed issues. With in-house, it’ll take a long time to find the right fit, freelancers will take longer to onboard, and agencies have their own deadlines to meet.
And over 60% of scaleups, we found, report that delivery speed is their main reason for looking at alternative hiring models. And there’s one model made to fulfill this gap: TaaS or Talent-as-a-service.
What is Talent-as-a-Service (TaaS) for design?
TaaS platforms have emerged as a solution, connecting companies with a global pool of vetted design professionals. And it offers:
- Agility: Quickly scale your design team up or down based on project demands, you get connected to professionals in days, not weeks, usually.
- Cost-effectiveness: Reduce overhead by paying for services as needed or through a simple subscription that gives you access to talent that can do the needed business’ tasks. No hidden costs on reviews and services, and no additional costs for full-time hiring.
- Access to the best talent worldwide: Tap into a wide range of skills and experiences without geographical limitations. Don’t hire the best in your city, hire the best-fit person for your company throughout the whole world.
By leveraging a simpler hiring process, such as TaaS, rather than waiting weeks on end for the best fit for a role, businesses can adapt to market changes swiftly, ensuring they remain competitive and responsive to customer needs.
In fact, the World Economic Forum has projected that by the end of 2025, over 45% of companies will shift part of their creative team to on-demand or subscription-based hiring models.
On-demand Talent and Subscriptions: Hiring Models Comparison
When we put it to the pen, and run the numbers of design subscriptions vs agencies vs freelancers vs in-house hiring, it becomes clear that TaaS isn't just a budget fix—it's an operational unlock.
You get design support that scales with you, instead of holding you back. Need to pause for a month? Done. Need a UI/UX designer for a sprint and a presentation designer the next? No need to rehire or to hire two people.
On-demand talent subscriptions adapt to your business. They fit you. It’s not you looking to hire, it’s them looking to solve your hiring pains. Don’t let hiring be a headache that never passes.
How to select a TaaS platform and on-demand talent subscriptions
We’d love to say that all the platforms can work for you and that you can’t go wrong with any platform you select. As we know, nothing is a silver bullet to the complex problem of hiring.
So here's what matters and what you should focus on to select an on-demand talent solution:
- Vetting process – How deep is it? Do they hire senior talent or just offload volume to junior and mid-level talent?
- Industry fit – Can they match you with designers who understand your niche?
- Communication support – Is there a success manager or is it self-serve? Does everyone speak and communicate in your preferred language and medium?
- Tooling – Do they integrate with your current tool stack (Slack, Figma, Trello, etc.) or are they another tool to manage?
- Turnaround time – Can they start delivering in days, not weeks? Speed is crucial.
The ideal way for a TaaS platform to feel is as an extension of your team, not another vendor or tool to manage. And the best way to know if that’s the case with your company is to ask about previous work they have done for similar companies.
A comprehensive case study and some reputation research will tell you more about the service than any demo or pitch deck could.
Step 3: Avoid These Common Mistakes When Hiring Designers
Okay. You got the perfect hire or on-demand talent service lined-up, but before putting pen to paper, make sure you avoid the following common mistakes or that the design subscription company or agency has the necessary structure to help you avoid them.
1. Vague Briefs
Everyone does briefs differently, and sometimes, working with a designer will entail creating a different brief that aids them in delivering better results. That’ll get refined over time, but you absolutely cannot make a confusing or vague briefing. Failing to define clear project expectations can lead to confusion, delays, and dissatisfaction for both sides.
Set specific objectives, clarify project goals, and agree on deliverables and timelines.
2. Overengineering Reviews
We understand that some projects take more time and require various approvals. However, if you need to involve countless stakeholders for every single task, then you most likely have an issue with many layers of approval that can dilute the design's effectiveness and vision and slow down the process. Streamlined feedback loops are crucial for maintaining momentum and quality.
Let’s make a challenge for your next task: Ask yourself: Do I absolutely need this many people to approve this design?
3. Ignoring Culture Fit
Even with freelancers or external agencies, understanding and integrating into your company's culture can significantly impact the collaboration's success. So if you’re going for an external partner, ensure they can rematch and replace designers as efficiently as possible. You may need it.
Step 4: Integrating designers into your team
Cool. You know how to select a talent partner, and you've got everything down. But even the best designer will underperform if your onboarding process is messy. Did you know that companies that onboard creative talent with a documented process complete projects 25% faster on average?
Here's how to avoid that, and this also works for long-term employment:
- Set up a proper kickoff with goals, tasks, and context
- Share your design system or brand guidelines from day one
- Keep async feedback loops tight but consistent
- Treat them like team members, not temps, not AI bots.
The best part about a design subscription company is that you can count on a customer support team to help you do just that. No headaches.
Step 5: Prepare for the Modular Future of Hiring Designers
We don’t mean to say that traditional hiring and in-house teams will be completely eliminated in the next few years, but the reality is that design needs are becoming increasingly fragmented.
A company that wants to grow its business quickly or scale a project might require an illustrator one day, a pitch deck designer the next, and a UI/UX specialist the following week.
Traditional hiring models were not built to accommodate this variability in a short span of time. But modular design services offer a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution.
If you can combine the responsiveness of in-house teams with the comprehensive expertise of agencies and the agility of freelancers. Why not give it a try? At worst, you spend less than what you would with a freelancer or a hire anyway, and that’s not counting the emotional toll.
By adopting modular design services, businesses unlock:
- Access a worldwide talent pool tailored to specific projects and industry needs.
- Scaling design efforts up or down without long-term financial commitments.
- Expanding skill sets seamlessly into existing workflows to deliver better experiences for clients.
The bottom line: An Awesomic Solution
Great design is a multiplier for your growth. It makes your product more trustworthy, your marketing more persuasive, and your company more memorable. But fantastic design teams don’t need to be built the old way.
If you're looking for:
- vetted senior talent
- no hiring friction
- cost savings of up to 70%
- faster time-to-design
…then Awesomic might be the solution for you.
Startups don’t have time for 3-month hiring cycles, nor do they have the expendable energy for tens of meetings to decide their messaging with agencies. Enterprises don’t want design to become a bottleneck.
And no one wants to overpay. Welcome to a modular creative ops.
Looking for vetted designers without the hiring drama, freelance inconsistency, or agency runaround? Awesomic helps teams like yours get started in days, not weeks. Book a demo and find out how today.
Strong branding used to be a differentiator. Today, it's the cost of entry.
Modern giants such as Starbucks and fast-growing companies such as Lovable have one thing in common: great design. We’ve learned that design builds trust before a single word is read. Did you know brands perceived as innovative grow 7x faster than others?
With design, you can make your product feel polished, new, and exciting. But how do you define great design? Better yet, how can you know who can bring you incredible design?
Hiring graphic designers is still one of the most elusive processes in creative operations.
With this guide, we’ll teach you how to find the best graphic designers in the business with no headaches. It doesn’t matter whether you’re at startups, scaleups, or enterprises looking to scale design output, grow businesses, or launch projects.
Step 1: Start with understanding what you need
Despite the advancements in design understanding, companies lump all designers together, struggle to vet portfolios, or burn months of revenue bouncing between unreliable freelancers and expensive agencies. Never more!
One of the key mistakes in hiring is not understanding the scope of your needs. If you don’t understand what type of designer or even which project that designer will handle, chances are you’ll regret your hiring choice.
Hiring the wrong type of designer is often more expensive than not hiring at all. It can cost up to 3x the amount of their salary alone.
Before posting a job listing for a designer, go through this quick checklist:
- Is this a one-time project or an ongoing need?
- Do you need generalists or specialists?
- What kind of turnaround time will be expected?
- Is design a bottleneck in another team’s workflow (e.g., marketing or product)?
Checklist for Understanding Graphic Designers' Needs
1. Is this a one-time project or an ongoing need?
This will inform whether or not you need a part-time or full-time designer. For many fast-growing companies that need to compete with competitors with speed of output, a full-time hire is a good idea. You must manage blog assets, website assets, social media creatives, newsletters, email collateral, rebrands, and more.
Enterprises and scaleups, which usually already have an established design team, need part-time help to unclog their workflow and deliver projects that their designers couldn't, even with the Shadow Clone Technique.
2. Do you need generalists or specialists?
This one pondering gets a lot of hiring managers off guard. Sometimes, the answer is both, and other times, it's unclear at the moment. But you have to ask yourself: What is the most crucial project that we have, and does it need the absolute best to deliver it?
Many times, specialists will simply deliver better than generalists. You don’t want to risk hiring a graphic designer who never did branding to re-do your brand’s identity, even if they’re incredibly talented at social media creatives, thumbnails, and packaging design.
Right now, you need to forget about the cost. We’ll explore this later. Consider the ideal team you’d need for your company's creative process and communication reach.
3. What kind of turnaround time will be expected?
Now, onto another big friction point between designers and stakeholders with a non-design background. The turnaround time for a project. Here’s a simple way to break it down:
- What’s the longest it can take and still work out?
- What’s the ideal timeline?
- What’s the fastest timeline you want?
The answer for the best turnaround time is expected to be in the middle of these three timeframes.
Let’s say you’re part of a scaleup and want a new brand identity in the fastest delivery at 3 days, but ideally you’d want to get a well-thought-out design that lasts for a long time, then it’d be okay to take about 1 month, but taking 3 months would be almost outrageous.
Your expected turnaround for that particular project is between one month and two. If you’re fast with the feedback, already have the look and feel in mind, and maybe have references, then you’d start to cut back on the time.
Every design project has to strike a balance between care, quality, consistency, and an acceptable deliverable timeline for a business. So, work with the designer and align that delivery timeline before committing to a deadline.
4. Is design a bottleneck in another team’s workflow (e.g., marketing or product)?
Here’s where the real difference-maker presents itself. Design is often seen as something nice to have, but in reality, it’s crucial for teams in marketing and product.
So, suppose your product team can’t release features fast enough because of design constraints, and your marketing team cannot reach audiences across channels and capture attention. How will your business ever grow?
Understanding the differences in branding refresh, ongoing content design, app UI, motion graphics, and others is essential. The difference isn't just operational. It requires an entirely different set of skills.
This quick checklist can save you tens of thousands in misalignment costs.
Step 2: Choose between in-house, freelance, and agencies
Businesses typically consider three primary avenues for design talent:
- In-house designers: offering consistent brand alignment and task delivery, but come with higher overhead costs and time-to-fill.
- Freelancers: providing flexibility but may lack long-term commitment and consistency. A Remote report found the primary problem business owners have with freelancers is consistency.
- Agencies: delivering comprehensive services, but can be expensive and less adaptable to rapid changes.
Each model has its merits, but they may not always align with the dynamic needs of modern businesses. However, all of them suffer from speed issues. With in-house, it’ll take a long time to find the right fit, freelancers will take longer to onboard, and agencies have their own deadlines to meet.
And over 60% of scaleups, we found, report that delivery speed is their main reason for looking at alternative hiring models. And there’s one model made to fulfill this gap: TaaS or Talent-as-a-service.
What is Talent-as-a-Service (TaaS) for design?
TaaS platforms have emerged as a solution, connecting companies with a global pool of vetted design professionals. And it offers:
- Agility: Quickly scale your design team up or down based on project demands, you get connected to professionals in days, not weeks, usually.
- Cost-effectiveness: Reduce overhead by paying for services as needed or through a simple subscription that gives you access to talent that can do the needed business’ tasks. No hidden costs on reviews and services, and no additional costs for full-time hiring.
- Access to the best talent worldwide: Tap into a wide range of skills and experiences without geographical limitations. Don’t hire the best in your city, hire the best-fit person for your company throughout the whole world.
By leveraging a simpler hiring process, such as TaaS, rather than waiting weeks on end for the best fit for a role, businesses can adapt to market changes swiftly, ensuring they remain competitive and responsive to customer needs.
In fact, the World Economic Forum has projected that by the end of 2025, over 45% of companies will shift part of their creative team to on-demand or subscription-based hiring models.
On-demand Talent and Subscriptions: Hiring Models Comparison
When we put it to the pen, and run the numbers of design subscriptions vs agencies vs freelancers vs in-house hiring, it becomes clear that TaaS isn't just a budget fix—it's an operational unlock.
You get design support that scales with you, instead of holding you back. Need to pause for a month? Done. Need a UI/UX designer for a sprint and a presentation designer the next? No need to rehire or to hire two people.
On-demand talent subscriptions adapt to your business. They fit you. It’s not you looking to hire, it’s them looking to solve your hiring pains. Don’t let hiring be a headache that never passes.
How to select a TaaS platform and on-demand talent subscriptions
We’d love to say that all the platforms can work for you and that you can’t go wrong with any platform you select. As we know, nothing is a silver bullet to the complex problem of hiring.
So here's what matters and what you should focus on to select an on-demand talent solution:
- Vetting process – How deep is it? Do they hire senior talent or just offload volume to junior and mid-level talent?
- Industry fit – Can they match you with designers who understand your niche?
- Communication support – Is there a success manager or is it self-serve? Does everyone speak and communicate in your preferred language and medium?
- Tooling – Do they integrate with your current tool stack (Slack, Figma, Trello, etc.) or are they another tool to manage?
- Turnaround time – Can they start delivering in days, not weeks? Speed is crucial.
The ideal way for a TaaS platform to feel is as an extension of your team, not another vendor or tool to manage. And the best way to know if that’s the case with your company is to ask about previous work they have done for similar companies.
A comprehensive case study and some reputation research will tell you more about the service than any demo or pitch deck could.
Step 3: Avoid These Common Mistakes When Hiring Designers
Okay. You got the perfect hire or on-demand talent service lined-up, but before putting pen to paper, make sure you avoid the following common mistakes or that the design subscription company or agency has the necessary structure to help you avoid them.
1. Vague Briefs
Everyone does briefs differently, and sometimes, working with a designer will entail creating a different brief that aids them in delivering better results. That’ll get refined over time, but you absolutely cannot make a confusing or vague briefing. Failing to define clear project expectations can lead to confusion, delays, and dissatisfaction for both sides.
Set specific objectives, clarify project goals, and agree on deliverables and timelines.
2. Overengineering Reviews
We understand that some projects take more time and require various approvals. However, if you need to involve countless stakeholders for every single task, then you most likely have an issue with many layers of approval that can dilute the design's effectiveness and vision and slow down the process. Streamlined feedback loops are crucial for maintaining momentum and quality.
Let’s make a challenge for your next task: Ask yourself: Do I absolutely need this many people to approve this design?
3. Ignoring Culture Fit
Even with freelancers or external agencies, understanding and integrating into your company's culture can significantly impact the collaboration's success. So if you’re going for an external partner, ensure they can rematch and replace designers as efficiently as possible. You may need it.
Step 4: Integrating designers into your team
Cool. You know how to select a talent partner, and you've got everything down. But even the best designer will underperform if your onboarding process is messy. Did you know that companies that onboard creative talent with a documented process complete projects 25% faster on average?
Here's how to avoid that, and this also works for long-term employment:
- Set up a proper kickoff with goals, tasks, and context
- Share your design system or brand guidelines from day one
- Keep async feedback loops tight but consistent
- Treat them like team members, not temps, not AI bots.
The best part about a design subscription company is that you can count on a customer support team to help you do just that. No headaches.
Step 5: Prepare for the Modular Future of Hiring Designers
We don’t mean to say that traditional hiring and in-house teams will be completely eliminated in the next few years, but the reality is that design needs are becoming increasingly fragmented.
A company that wants to grow its business quickly or scale a project might require an illustrator one day, a pitch deck designer the next, and a UI/UX specialist the following week.
Traditional hiring models were not built to accommodate this variability in a short span of time. But modular design services offer a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution.
If you can combine the responsiveness of in-house teams with the comprehensive expertise of agencies and the agility of freelancers. Why not give it a try? At worst, you spend less than what you would with a freelancer or a hire anyway, and that’s not counting the emotional toll.
By adopting modular design services, businesses unlock:
- Access a worldwide talent pool tailored to specific projects and industry needs.
- Scaling design efforts up or down without long-term financial commitments.
- Expanding skill sets seamlessly into existing workflows to deliver better experiences for clients.
The bottom line: An Awesomic Solution
Great design is a multiplier for your growth. It makes your product more trustworthy, your marketing more persuasive, and your company more memorable. But fantastic design teams don’t need to be built the old way.
If you're looking for:
- vetted senior talent
- no hiring friction
- cost savings of up to 70%
- faster time-to-design
…then Awesomic might be the solution for you.
Startups don’t have time for 3-month hiring cycles, nor do they have the expendable energy for tens of meetings to decide their messaging with agencies. Enterprises don’t want design to become a bottleneck.
And no one wants to overpay. Welcome to a modular creative ops.
Looking for vetted designers without the hiring drama, freelance inconsistency, or agency runaround? Awesomic helps teams like yours get started in days, not weeks. Book a demo and find out how today.
