3 unexpected reasons to hire a brand designer

There are three reasons to hire a brand designer that no one really talks about, and they can actually bring a lot more value than just the visuals alone.

In this post, I want to share three unexpected ways your brand designer can bring value to your business. Sure, you hire a designer to design something for you, create a marketing piece, or help shape your brand. But these are the unexpected bonuses they bring that add a ton of value to your business.

1. Aesthetic taste

Designers aren't born with taste — it's something we craft and hone over time. If you don't work in the creative space, you may or may not have that natural leaning. So when you hire a designer, that's a hard-earned skill they bring to the table.

Even though design isn't art, making design decisions can sometimes be more of an art than a science. There are design rules we're all taught and learn over time, but certain instances actually require breaking those rules. Having a designer on your team helps you know when it's the right time to break a rule versus when it's the right time to stick with best practices.

Through years of honing our eye, designers can help pinpoint when something feels dated, generic, cheap, or just… off. (Even if we can't always articulate why.) We know when it's better to break or bend a design rule rather than keep it.

A good example: In most languages, people read from left-to-right, so to make your text easy-to-read, you normally want it left-justified, not centered. But every now and again, centering the text is actually the better option — maybe because you're trying to work with other elements around it. Best practice would say to keep the text left-justified, but a designer can offer the context that, in this particular situation, centering is the better choice.

Likewise, designers help you avoid trends that can age your brand quickly, and we know how to create cohesion and depth across everything. When you have a designer's taste on your side, it helps you make better, more cohesive decisions faster, so you're not stuck evaluating 20 options for everything (and hoping you make a good choice). When you hire a designer, you're not just hiring someone to lay out a design or make something look pretty—you're borrowing their decision-making filter, which is their taste.

2. External perspective

The second thing you get when you bring a designer on board is their external perspective. When you work on a team inside a business, it's easy to start seeing the business only from the internal perspective. But when you hire a designer who isn't an everyday part of your team, they can offer up an outside perspective, which might actually relate better to what the customer might see in your materials and communications.

That gives you insight into areas that might be confusing, conflicting, unclear, or simply not emphasizing the right thing. As a business owner or employee, you can get too close to your own brand. This can create gaps between what you think your customers experience and what they actually experience.

Designers sit in a middle ground: inside enough to understand what's going on in the business, but outside enough to see where things might be getting misinterpreted.

Designers also tend to have finely honed intuition and pick up on subtle emotional cues — things not everyone can cognitively pinpoint, but might feel if they were in the customer's shoes.

They can spot messaging gaps or confusing language that might trip up a customer. They ask the questions your customers ask, but that you might not think to ask. And they help translate what you mean into what a customer will actually understand. The truth is, a good designer is often closer to your customer's perspective than you are.

3. They challenge you

The third thing a designer brings to the table is that they challenge you. Most brands default to what feels safe, or to what they see their competitors doing — which is often forgettable, or at best, a little confusing.

This is totally understandable, because as a non-designer, you can't always see all the ways a brand could visually play out and how that could help you stand out. Designers are experts at observing patterns across industries and cultures, so they know what's overdone. They can push you just outside your comfort zone without taking you off-brand, and they give you permission to do something different. Sometimes all you need is a little nudge.

The truth is, strategic risk is often what makes a brand memorable. If your brand feels a little uncomfortable in a good way, that might be a good sign you're on the right track.

The bigger picture

As you can see, your designer brings a lot more to the table than logos, color palettes, or layout treatments. Tapping into a designer's perspective helps you elevate your brand image while gaining more clarity. Having a brand designer on your team leads to stronger outcomes by helping you see things you might not have seen otherwise.

If you've been thinking about hiring a designer, I hope this gives you a slightly different lens to look through!