While your business success depends on your product offer, a strong visual identity is what makes your brand memorable and helps you achieve recognition among your target audience. The best way to build a powerful brand identity is to hire a brand designer.
A professional brand designer works with a broad skill set. They design your logo, develop brand guidelines, and oversee marketing and content creation efforts to ensure consistency.
If you want to onboard a brand designer, use this guide to learn more about the role and the hiring process. We’ll share tips to help you find, choose, and hire brand designers. You’ll also learn about MarketerHire, a platform that can match you with proven branding and marketing experts in no time.
What Is a Brand Designer?
Brand design is the process of creating visual assets that represent your company and make it unique. These assets include:
- Logos
- Color palettes
- Merchandise
- Ads
- Brochures
The role of a brand designer is similar to that of a graphic designer since both are creative professionals who design marketing materials. However, graphic designers have a broader focus and can craft varied content, including packaging and user interfaces.
A brand designer focuses on brand identity development, crafting guidelines that graphic designers can later use to create other assets.
In many cases, graphic designers, brand marketers, and marketing executives are also responsible for developing the company’s brand image. Still, they may not offer the same level of expertise and commitment that a dedicated brand designer can provide.
Brand designers have a holistic view of your company’s market positioning and messaging, and they translate this information into visuals that resonate with your audience. While expensive to hire up-front, engaging a brand designer can turn out to be a wise long-term investment.
Understanding the graphic design team structure is essential when managing these creative processes effectively.
What Does a Brand Designer Do?
Brand designers’ duties depend on the needs and industry of the company they’re working for. Usually, they include:
- Brand development: The designer must first learn about your company, its goals, values, audience, and preferred messaging. They can then develop a personalized and effective visual branding strategy and create the brand guidelines, including the logo, color scheme, and typography
- Material design: Once they’ve established the basics, the designer can create various marketing materials, such as ads, social media posts, illustrations, and website elements
- Monitoring and collaboration: The designer must work with the product development and marketing team to ensure consistent branding across all channels
- Research and improvement: Once they evaluate the effectiveness of their branding efforts, the designer can suggest and implement improvements. They must also stay current with the latest trends and market shifts
When and Why Should You Hire Brand Designers?
If you’re developing your brand or revamping the existing branding strategy, a brand designer should be one of the first roles you hire. Their work can influence many other aspects of your business, including product design, website design, and marketing.
Having an established visual identity from the get-go will ensure cohesion and efficiency across all touchpoints.
You should hire a brand designer if:
- You don’t have any branding experts on hand
- Your past branding efforts were inconsistent or ineffective
- You’re going through a merger and need to unite two brands
- Your company is large, requires a wide range of materials, or relies on great branding
If the budget is tight, you can hire a fractional or freelance brand designer and get the expertise you need at an affordable price. Learn about the pros and cons of each model compared to in-house hiring:
Perks of Hiring a Brand Designer
With an excellent brand designer, your business will reap the following four benefits:
- Polished brand: Well-styled and consistent visuals will help your brand leave a positive first impression on potential customers
- Brand recognition: A memorable brand that aligns with your messaging will distinguish your business from the competition
- Trust and credibility: Thanks to an instantly recognizable and professional-looking brand, your customer base will be more likely to trust it and make purchases
- Increase in value: Over time, your traffic, engagement, and sales will grow, helping your business succeed and outperform competitors
What To Look For in Brand Designers
Use the information in the table below to write an effective job description and find your perfect brand designer:
How To Hire a Brand Designer
Take the steps below to recruit a brand designer fitting for your business:
- Define your needs: Figure out your budget and timeline and decide whether you need a fractional or full-time brand designer
- Look far and wide: Advertise your vacancy wherever you can. For example, you can post a job ad on generalist or design-based job boards, such as 99designs, and freelancing sites like Upwork and Freelancer. You can also use social media like LinkedIn to advertise, browse candidates, and ask for recommendations from your network
- Prioritize portfolios over resumes: When screening candidates, pay the most attention to their past work. Shortlist the designers who’ve worked with familiar brands and whose style would match your brand vision
- Interview top candidates: To assess candidates’ communication skills and cultural fit, meet with them in person or via video call to learn more about their past work and design process
- Partner with a reliable recruiting agency or platform: Delegating the recruiting process to experts can save you time and effort, but you should choose your provider carefully. Look for a platform like MarketerHire that pre-vets candidates and offers some form of quality assurance to reduce the risk of a bad hire
Pitfalls of the Traditional Approach To Hiring a Brand Designer
The reasons so many companies dread in-house recruiting and choose to outsource it include:
- Long time-to-hire: When hiring for such a specific role, the process can take a lot of time and effort. Sourcing, screening, and interviewing candidates often takes months, which means you can’t hire a brand designer urgently
- Potential risks: There’s no way to know how a designer will perform until they start working, but a proven recruiting process usually has a higher success rate. If you don’t have one, you run the risk of hiring an incompatible designer, wasting precious resources, and having to repeat the costly recruiting process
With a long-standing recruiting partner such as MarketerHire, overcoming these roadblocks is easy. MarketerHire is a matchmaking platform that can connect you with pre-vetted experts in days and offer you free rematching to ensure effective and stress-free hiring.
Why Is MarketerHire the Best Choice for Hiring a Brand Designer?
Whether you need to hire a brand designer to establish your brand or an expert marketer to promote it, you can count on MarketerHire to find a top-notch professional for your business in only a few days.
Since 2018, MarketerHire has made over 30,000 successful matches. It has proudly served thousands of companies, from startups to well-known names such as Forbes and HP.
The platform eliminates all the pain and risk associated with traditional hiring with its white-glove approach. You only have to describe what you need, and MarketerHire’s experts will quickly zero in on the perfect candidate from its pool of pre-vetted talent.
Although many of the experts have worked with household brands like Netflix and Unilever, they all undergo a rigorous and extensive screening process. Only the top 1% are admitted into the network, so you can rest assured you’re getting top-level expertise with every match.
Still, if you realize your match isn’t a great fit during a two-week trial, you’ll get a new match for free. You can also scale up, scale down, or cancel as needed since all MarketerHire contracts are short-term and flexible.
How MarketerHire Works
Learn about the process of recruiting experts with MarketerHire:
- Describing your needs: Meet with your marketing manager to let them know about your company and the type of brand designer you’re looking to hire
- Meeting your expert: Using MarketerMatch, a proprietary system that combines AI and human insight, the platform will pinpoint the ideal candidate in about 48 hours
- Project kick-off: You can hire your new brand designer in as little as three days
Your marketing manager will guide you throughout the recruiting process and check in with you even after you’ve made the hire.
MarketerHire supports various employment types and roles, including brand marketers, growth marketers, and fractional CMOs. It can also connect you with Expert Assistants to help your design, marketing, or sales team with any repetitive tasks.
Create an unforgettable brand identity—use MarketerHire to recruit brand designers and other A-list experts effortlessly!
Other Hiring Guides To Check Out
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