How To Choose A Brand Design Studio To Work With
You’ve learned about the differences when it comes to branding vs marketing and you know the signs of when it's time to rebrand, so it’s now time to put all your knowledge to work and choose a brand design studio to help bring your vision to life.
There’s never been more branding and design studios to choose from, so how do you pick the one that’s going to be the right support for you and your brand?
😕 But first of all, why choose a design studio at all?
With the onset of online platforms such as Canva, Fiverr, UpWork and Freelancer (to name but a few) it’s never been easier to purchase a logo or build a website — all at a fraction of the price of engaging a brand design studio.
So why choose a design studio at all then?
Put simple experience.
Experience means getting it right first time, it means confidence moving forward. I mean we can all download Martha Stewarts souffle recipe but I can guarantee the results won’t be the same if Martha had made it herself.
So to be frank, whilst you could go out there and build a brand yourself, we believe your idea deserves better.
🤓 / 🤩 Specialists vs Full-Service
First and foremost, choosing the type of help you’d like to engage with, whether that be a full-spectrum agency or a team of brand specialists, is key.
Why?
Because the type of professionals you work with will impact the methods, outcomes and overall vision of the work, so it’s important to understand what you’re looking for and find the best partner for the job who can execute this for you.
A full-service creative agency is a great choice for those who are after a broad-spectrum approach, or perhaps aren’t sure what creative facets will work best for their business just yet. In a full-service agency setting, a team is formed by a range of specialists across different avenues who work together to create a broad approach to problems and briefs, without the entire team necessarily being experts in the same area.
Studios like this will offer brand design services, but other things too such as digital advertising, web development, or social media content creation and management.
A full-service studio is a great avenue to be able to test out different avenues of creative strategy.
Now, it's not to say that brand specialists don’t also have the skills to offer broad services like in a full-service studio, but it's in the name itself - they are specialists at what they do.
Brand specialist teams are laser-focussed on brand strategies and their results, and help clients implement deeply developed and agile plans to improve brand performance. These plans may include things offered at a full-service agency, like digital marketing or ad creation, but are led heavily by an educated, calculated strategy.
Working with branding specialists is perfect for those ready to really kick things up a notch when it comes to their overall brand perception, creative and strategic operations.
We would argue that the best brand design studios are ones that are flexible - specialists in their field but agile enough to know that they can also provide a brilliant, high quality, full-scope experience for their client.
However, a great brand identity design studio, or a branding specialist, can also perform and provide great results. A great example of this is our relationship with Blundstone. Whilst we established their brand strategy, we also designed the framework for everything from packaging, to store design, website design and advertising for their team.
🏆 Industry Experience and Awards
Taking brand experience as a whole, reputation is crucial.
Nobody wants to work with a brand identity design studio with an array of 1-star reviews on Google, or a lack of proof to back up all the great things you’ve read and heard.
This is where industry experience, awards and customer feedback become one of your most important decision-making tools in your arsenal.
One of the first things to look for in a brand design studio, is the types of clients they are working with and the degree of industry experience they have.
The best brand design studios will have a clientele that are achieving great results, are implementing cutting-edge and agile strategies, and have a clearly outstanding approach to the work they create.
If your branding and design studio of choice is working with clients who are at a similar level of success (or even better, more established than your own brand), have clients who are doing impactful and brilliant work and associate themselves with their fellow agencies and businesses that also uphold values and morals that align to your own, they are a studio you should most definitely enquire with.
Furthermore, awards can also help you establish whether a brand design studio is your perfect professional match - but only to a degree.
Awards can be important to work out where the brand identity design studio is positioned in terms of leadership in their field, help establish their level of professionalism and reputation, and understand what work is outstanding against the industry benchmarks.
Awards are important for agencies internally too, in that they provide a third-party validation of the quality of the work they are creating. Industry awards are, however, exactly what the name implies: industry awards. They are run by designers, for designers, and judge the scope of work - you guessed it - through the lens of a designer. The moral of the story here is that awards do not define the success of a brand design studio.
What can help define the success of a brand design studio, though, are client testimonials.
Social proof allows us to see exactly what the customer experience is like candidly and without influence, and can help us decide whether we are the right type of client for the agency and vice versa. A great, honest client testimonial speaks volumes about the type of work a brand identity design studio is doing.
The best brand design studios will have some combination of industry experience, awards, or testimonials to help you make your decision and in turn, help you make the most effective choice for your business.
🤟 Relationships and Values
When looking for the right brand design studio to partner with, it’s important to be practical and realistic about what you’re after and how you want it to occur, meaning both yours and your potential agency of choice’s values and missions really come into play during this process.
An important question you can ask yourself when looking for a brand design studio, is what the type of relationship you’re really looking for is.
Are you looking to partner with a full-service agency for 12-18 months to try different things?
Are you looking to partner with a specialist in a long-term, ongoing capacity to help build your brand and direct down a targeted path for success?
These are important questions to ask yourself during this process to ensure you’re getting exactly what you need out of the experience of partnering with a brand design studio, and important for the studio as well, to ensure they can deliver your vision.
The final thing that is imperative to consider when choosing a brand design studio is finding a team who honour the same values as you and your business do.
It really pays for both parties to have purpose behind what you’re creating together, beyond just revenue. It’s the deep values and missions of both brands, and what is possible when those come together, that can really create something special.
Here at Founded by Design, we’re lucky enough to work with a number of B-Corps, as well as brands such as Multigate who value sustainability, ethics and quality work.
We work with brands who understand the value and power of branding and design — sound like you? Maybe we should chat!
Who we don’t work with are tobacco, arms or any brands we don’t feel are genuine in the way they present themselves.
🤔 In summary
Understanding what you want to achieve from working with a brand design studio makes all the difference when engaging in the process of choosing a team to partner with.
You and your brand deserve the best, so by deeply understanding what you want and need out of an agency, allows these branding professionals to create a strategic plan that does your vision justice.
Chris Thomas is an independent design and branding specialist with over 20 years experience working with iconic brands across a wide range of sectors spanning the UK, EU, US, Middle East, Asia and here in Australia. He is the owner and Creative Director at Founded by Design, and has been awarded both nationally and internationally for his work.
