In-House Design: Why and Why Not
By Sandra K. Williams ©1997
Thinking about doing all your promotional materials in-house? Perhaps you’ve thought about how convenient it would be to have someone on staff who could whip out a professional newsletter or update your catalog instantly. Perhaps you’ve been doing your materials and want to concentrate on managing your business.
But creating an in-house graphics department doesn’t always make good business sense.
Consider, first of all, how many promotional materials you have and how often they need to be updated. Can you seriously justify hiring a person full- or part-time to produce them? If you move someone already on staff into that position, will your service or products be affected? Will your neophyte graphics person have the expertise to produce professional-quality materials and coordinate with your printer? Are you willing to subsidize graphics training?
Who will do the writing, the editing, the proofreading? These are skills most people haven’t studied, and mistakes in your promotional materials cause lost sales, not poor grades.
Another important factor is the expense of setting up a graphics department. Not only do you have the expense of another employee, you also need space, equipment, and software. You should have image editing, vector drawing, and page layout software to produce high-quality graphics; the major software programs cost approximately $500 each for the full version. In addition, you’ll need utilities to manage your fonts and streamline your operations. You might also want to subscribe to a clipart service. And all this software will need to be upgraded periodically.
These professional-level graphics programs require professional-level equipment, as well. The recent plummet in computer prices makes new hardware affordable, but you still need to make sure you purchase enough RAM and the right video card for your purpose.
Don’t forget computer support; requirements for desktop publishing are more stringent than for using MS Office. If you have computer glitches now, wait until you install professional graphics software. Someone in your company will need to stay on top of software updates, the idiosyncrasies of individual software programs, and how to make them work together.
The big pluses of doing all your promotional materials in house are keeping all your information on site and knowing your rush project won’t have to wait in line at the designer’s.
However, with an annual marketing plan that allows enough lead time for your promotions, outsourcing your design and writing functions would save you money and enable you to concentrate on your core product or service. With e-mail and fax communications, you don’t need to have all work performed in-house as long as you have a good relationship with your writer or designer.
The catch in working with outside services is that you have to stay on track with your marketing plan instead of being diverted by daily crises. But isn’t staying on track just one way you take command of your business?
Published in the River City Small Business News