For any business, we know that it’s important to get work orders out to your clients and customers on time. For small businesses, paying attention to details is a must; you should be focused on the quality of work you are producing and ensuring that it’s representing your clients’ ideals. So, for small screen print shops, allowing a graphic designer to provide the creative artwork for your pieces should be considered, but why would you outsource artwork for screen printing?
Aside from quality assurance, most small print shops or “one-man shop” owners hope to focus more on meeting deadlines instead of worrying about parts of a tenuous process. Outsourcing your artwork presents a solution to problems of cost and helps alleviate the work of a busy printing press production schedule. These tips are to help these small business owners determine and understand how they can incorporate a graphic designer as a member of their team. Through time, money, and even the rate of production, the advantages of having a graphic designer on your team are endless.
Benefits of Outsourcing Artwork
If you lack access to a graphic designer at your shop or don’t have someone that has artistic creativity, you should invest in outsourcing your artwork to graphic designers, especially for the “one-man shop” owners. Some of the major benefits include saving time, money, and production. These are three of the basic components that shop owners should pay attention to.
- Time: This will be benefited by freeing up the focus of your project to work on other tasks for print jobs. In the time that you would spend designing artwork, if you don’t have a background in it, you could be pursuing other projects while the designer handles all of the artwork.
- Money: It will help lower the cost of production so you won’t have to spend the extra money on additional equipment and salaries for temporary employees. Make sure you have a designated budget set aside for potential projects that require additional help.
- Production: Outsourcing your artwork can help the efficiency of the production line. This way you can work on multiple client projects, thus, accomplishing deadlines effectively on time. You should give them your ideas as well as the clients so they can help meet the deadlines of the production schedule.
As a small production screen printing business; there are other benefits of outsourcing artwork to graphic designers that can help your company in the long haul. However, owners will need to sit down and talk with the designer about the type of artwork your clientele would like for certain projects.
What type of work should you outsource?
Time is money and timely production equals money for small businesses when they are a “one-man” shop. When you sit down with the designer about the design of the artwork; you should decide on the budget, as well as when it will become available. Small businesses should also take into account the time the designer requires to develop the artwork so you can stick to production schedules.
Some artwork may take longer to design than others. There are various situations that you would need to hire a graphic designer for screen printing work:
- Original Custom Graphics
- Drawings by Clients
- Adjusting Files, Resizing, Color-Matching, and Removing Backgrounds
- Make Existing Files
- Redesign
- Communicate with the Graphic Designer
For small screen printing businesses, graphic designers can help produce original custom graphics for clients as well as keep the design on file so you can use it for later projects and tweak it to your liking. They can also help bring the client’s vision to life through the designs that they create while making sure that the design is able to be printed for screens on the printing press. Communicate with your graphic designer if any files need to be adjusted, resized, color-matched, and/or if anything needs to be removed. Effective communication will help make job turnover faster!
After speaking with the designer you hired, you need to set schedules and deadlines for when artwork needs to be completed and produced. Once the artwork is perfect for the client, it’s set to go for production, more projects, and advancements in your screen-printing career can be taken!
Following and establishing a successful business partnership with a potential graphic designer to outsource your artwork will help your business in the long run. You do not want to overwork yourselves when trying to design artwork if you don’t have a background in design. Hire someone you trust to help you with your screen printing projects. At EXILE Technologies, we strive to help the average screen printer out when it comes to the products and services you need for your business.
