Value of an Expert: Part One
Tue. Mar, 2009 by Amy
A quality, experienced design agency can save you money on production costs.
It’s true. I’ll describe in another post the value of design, which actually does have an ROI although it can not be as easily measured as some services. I have countless stories from clients and others about costly mistakes or missed opportunities because they tried a do-it-yourself approach. Simply put, unless you have been designing for decades and working with a variety of printers and projects, there is no way for you to have the experience you hire us for.
Using a printer not suited to your project will cost more money. The press won’t be as cost-efficient, or your job will be outsourced and marked up. Other issues with DIY include incurring print production time to fix mistakes in your files. Unless you are comfortable with CMYK and spot colors, dpi, bleeds, links, embedding, vector, registration and similar terminology, you are taking a risk. There are other details to be aware of such as mailing requirements. Printing 5,000 mailing pieces and not being able to send them bulk rate because the fold is on the wrong side will cost a lot of money in postage if you are not up to speed on postal rules.
Then there are the missed opportunities. When printing business cards for example, we can suggest ways to maximize your printing costs by ganging up another piece with it, or printing shells so you save money on future runs. Everything is on a case by case basis, and there are many different issues that can occur, each specific to the unique design.
This does not just pertain to print, although those issues tend to be more permanent and expensive and the web is much more forgiving with image quality. However, if a web site is designed without being search engine optimized or created to be usable by the end user, the money is not well spent. Knowing which host to use is crucial. You could overpay for something you don’t need, or pay for something that is not reliable or appropriate for your needs. Especially with e-commerce, there are very important factors to consider with security.
This post has been nagging at me every time I see an expensive ad in a magazine where the logo is obviously web quality, a postcard that goes out at great expense yet is unreadable, or someone pays $35 each for domain names.
Let us put our years of experience to work for you.