Outsourcing Your Designs

This week we begin a series of articles about visual design. When it’s time to develop branded materials for your online presence or for a big launch, you can choose to outsource those projects or design materials on your own. If you’re looking to outsource, you have more options than you might know.

Hiring and working with a designer to develop your brand identity can be a lengthy and costly process, and there’s a chance that you’ll end up with a design that’s not quite what you hoped for. If you’re just starting your network marketing business, and you don’t have the money required to follow the traditional route, there are a few resources available for working with graphic designers. This week, we’re featuring other articles on MLM.com covering Fiverr and 99 Designs, two online resources for connecting with graphic designers without breaking the bank.

To begin any design plan, make a list of design projects you need completed and collect a few examples of design work that you like or would like to emulate. You might also want to write down a few descriptive words expressing the “spirit” of your brand—the energy you want your visuals to communicate. It could be fun, youthful, classic, chic, natural, professional, etc. A fast look at the yearly Webby Awards will give you a sense of the range of “spirit” you can design for.

In network marketing, you can see a wide range of online “look and feel” coming from organizations and company pages. Take for example two direct selling professional organizations, The Direct Selling Association and The Direct Selling WorldWide Alliance. Each organization provides a professional website. Each website portrays a different feel. Now compare two company pages, doTerra and Nature’s Sunshine. The doTerra site color scheme and focal point on the center of the page provide what I would call a people-first feel. Nature Sunshine’s page splits the page into thirds which has a more traditional informational feel. The companies may or may not have intended the feel that I found. The person viewing the page experiences the page from their own worldview. The trick of design is working with that in mind and creating looks that speak to as many audiences as possible. Working with a professional designer can improve your chances of accomplishing that.

If you have a rough idea of what you want, but don’t have extra time or natural aesthetic inclinations, you’ll probably benefit from working with a specialist. Whether you take the traditional route or use one of the services we recommend, take a few minutes to understand which tool is going to give you the best results. Next week, we will discuss how to design your own visuals using design software. In this series, we’ll cover designing software, color, business card design, and how to broaden your skills.