SketchDeck was built to make great design faster, easier and more accessible. We bring this capability to hundreds of teams across many companies, from 100 person tech companies to the Fortune 100.
When it comes to design, every client is different. In this article we share five ways our clients work with SketchDeck:
1. Making design scale
Building an in-house team requires significant time and money: hiring, on-boarding, training, and management. Once onboard, they take time and effort to keep running well. Creatives need a creative environment. Many enterprises struggle to do this, especially when design is not a core competency of the company.
We provide CMOs and heads of brand with a high quality, scalable design solution without the distraction and cost of building out an agency in-house. Global scale is needed, which can be difficult even for the world’s largest companies. Our platform makes design available across the globe.
Volume of projects can also be a challenge, especially when this volume fluctuates or high volumes are needed quickly. In-house teams are rarely built for this. One of the most common problems clients come to us with is in-house teams taking weeks to complete projects. This doesn’t work for the velocity of modern teams. SketchDeck trains a team to work at your peak capacity and our custom software improves speed and efficiency of design. During quiet periods these designers support other clients, avoiding idle time.
2. Extending in-house capabilities
In-house teams rarely cover all the design needs a company has. The internal team may, for example, focus on product design and brand. This leaves many important projects unserved.
We partner with many in-house teams to fill the gaps in their capabilities. The team’s project manager sends projects through our platform if their team has too much work, or doesn’t have the necessary skills in-house. An example is attending a conference, where the in-house team defines the creative strategy and SketchDeck creates the assets.
3. Increasing team productivity
Teams spend hundreds of hours designing materials that go in front of clients. Most salespeople create their own presentations. We’ve seen similar patterns across internal communication, support, and even marketing teams.
Creating your own materials comes with two problems. Team members spend time on design rather than the skills and goals they are best at. The design they create is often bad an off brand, reducing the impact of the materials and damaging the brand. We call this shadow design.
SketchDeck has a production design solution that ensures day-to-day materials get the design they need, with the speed and efficiency that works for busy teams. Powerpoints, emails, One-sheets – everything that comes up in the course of doing business. Teams can focus on their roles instead of design which raises the quality bar and increases productivity.
4. A team in the budget of a single designer
Most of our clients are from organizations who already employ an agency and have dozens of designers in-house. We also work for smaller organizations who are growing and don’t have these resources in place. These companies have a budget for one or two designers, but they have a variety of needs that a team would better cover.
SketchDeck can help here. For less than the cost of a single designer, our membership provides access to a team with a breadth of skills which can handle most graphic design requests. For clients with this need, we become their “one stop shop” for graphic design, acting as the one who both defines and executes creative deliverables.
5. Complementing an agency
Most clients beyond 500 employees have an agency of record. SketchDeck is very different to a traditional design agency. Our software plus people approach allows us to work at a larger scale, faster and more efficiently than agencies. Agencies excel at large, high creativity projects, with long lead times and large budgets.
SketchDeck was built for day-to-day design needs, delivered at the same quality as agencies, but with a lower price and turnaround time. Projects that might take weeks with an agency takes only days with SketchDeck; and can be placed 24/7 through our online interface without the need for a meeting. Examples include one-pagers, emails, executive presentations, and infographics. Marketers find that between 35% and 50% of their projects can be redirected to us with significant reduction in cost and turnaround time.
We work well alongside many agencies, taking their creative vision and transforming it into the hundreds of front line assets needed to make business run.
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SketchDeck helps many different clients. The common thread is we make design run faster and more efficiently. In today’s fast moving world this is important. We improve business outcomes and strengthen brands.
We hope you’ve found this useful. Please schedule a call with us if you’d like to find out more.
