For marketers, agencies, and entrepreneurs looking for on-demand design, Design Pickle is one of the top recommendations. Wondering what makes this company one of the best unlimited graphic design services? This Design Pickle Review will answer all your questions.
Design Pickle was founded in Scottsdale, Arizona. In 2014, Russ Perry, a creative consultant, was looking for a way to streamline his design process. He came up with an idea to help overcome his never-ending design workload. And when his idea worked, he expanded it into a tool that let others with similar design woes tackle their workload. That’s how Design Pickle was born.
Almost a decade and more than a million design requests later, Design Pickle stands as one of the leading flat-rate graphic design service providers. It was listed in the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list in the years 2019, 2020, and 2021.
The service defines that its purpose is – “To change lives through creativity”
So, what makes Design Pickle a credible name in the unlimited graphic design realm? Let’s begin our Design Pickle review with a quick look at the plans available.
$499/month
$995/month
$1,695/month
Brands in industries ranging from healthcare to software services, lifestyle to consultation services, all benefit from the variety of designs that Design Pickle can deliver.
Design Pickle caters to most kinds of graphic designs both for digital and print advertising as well as for branding. Here are some of the designs the team can handle:
In motion graphics, (available with Graphics Premium), Design Pickle covers designs like:
What’s not included:
To understand what kinds of designs you can request and what designs are not part of the scope, check out the scope of Design Pickle services before you pay for your subscriptions.
Irrespective of the plan you choose, the workflow happens through the Design Pickle platform. This is where you place your requests, communicate with your designers, track progress, add/remove team members, manage brand profiles, evaluate the designs, and finally download them.
If you are not clear about the plans and process you can book a free demo call. This is a one-on-one consultation with an expert from the Design Pickle team.
Design Pickle gives you an option to directly sign up to create your account and gain access to a preview of the Dashboard. There is no free trial option and so you cannot place your design requests just yet. But as a registered user, you can explore the platform for free for 30 days.
Once you have compared the plans and identified the one that suits your needs, add your billing information to start your subscription. Design Pickle has a 14-day customer satisfaction period within which you are eligible for a refund if you are not happy with how things proceed. But this is only applicable if you pay for quarterly or annual subscriptions.
All the details from your brand guidelines will be part of your brand profile. This includes details like your brand colors, fonts, brand assets like logo design files, and everything else that helps a designer understand your brand. You can add as many brand profiles as you like and this is a handy option for agencies and marketers managing the creatives for multiple brands.
Once your brand profiles are in place, you can scroll through the available design types or create one from scratch. Add all the details including the file dimensions, format, and other information to create a useful brief for your designer.
The process for the allocation of designers depends on the plan you choose. Once you create your requests, designer allocation typically takes 1-2 business days.
With the Graphics plan, you are assigned a suitable designer for the request.
Graphics Pro and Graphics Premium plans come with designated designers. There is a team of one graphic designer, one illustration artist, and one presentation designer assigned to your project. And for the Graphics Premium plan, a motion graphics designer is also part of the team.
On your dashboard, you can quickly view the current progress of your requests. You can view your current queue, delivered designs, and any requests you have saved in drafts for a future requirement.
With the standard plans, Design Pickle only supports one active request. Which means that your requests are fulfilled in a queue. You can add more active tasks by adding more subscriptions. Otherwise, your designers work on the request in the order they appear on the dashboard. So, you can drag and drop items to rearrange the priorities.
Once your designer takes up a request you will see the status updated. This helps you understand whether the design is in progress or ready for review.
Once a design is ready for review, you can consult with your team and evaluate the design on all parameters to understand if any revisions are required.
The Design Pickle platform comes with convenient annotation tools that let you accurately point out specific aspects of the design you wish to revise.
Once the changes are made, if you are happy with the final design you can download the files including the source files, and mark the request as completed.
Design Pickle supports unlimited revisions. So you can always go back to your designer for changes to an old design.
Now that we’ve seen what the plans cover and how the process works, let’s talk about the strengths and setbacks of Design Pickle as an unlimited design service provider.
The Design Pickle platform is pretty easy to use. It simplifies your design workflow by streamlining all communication related to your design collaboration to one place.
You do not have to worry about scouring through old emails to find out that one little update you communicated to your designer or to find the design brief you sent a month ago. Everything is on the Design Pickle platform.
With the Graphics Premium and Graphics Pro plans you get Slack integration. This lets you quickly chat with your designers. But you cannot communicate with everyone on your team. You can only chat with the primary designated designer who then helps you relay the information to the respective designer who worked on your design.
To simplify the communication of your message you can also use screen recordings of up to 3 minutes.
Other than Zapier integration, Design Pickle also supports the automation of your workflow by connecting with other web apps like Asana, Basecamp, Trello, and more. This lets you access files for reference or save and access your designs and get notifications when your designs are ready. All these little steps ensure a smooth flow of processes in your marketing workflow.
With Graphics Pro and Graphics Premium, you get same-day turnaround as long as you place your request before the cutoff time defined. This turnaround is applicable to most digital and print ads, and merchandise designs with a simple brief.
Complex designs, illustrations, and presentations might take more than a day in many cases. And for motion graphics, the turnaround time is anywhere between 1-5 days.
These are some of the shortest turnaround times in the segment.
While the plans offered by Design Pickle are well worth the quality of work and the professional process the team delivers, the plans can be pretty expensive for small businesses on a tight budget.
The mere fact that you need to pay $999 every month to work with designated designers can be a turnoff. There are several design subscription services that offer designated designers in plans priced much lower than this.
Adding motion graphics further expands your expense drastically. So, unless you have a steady flow of designs and need a large volume of designs created every month, Design Pickle’s plans might seem a little too expensive.
The Graphics plan does not support a designated designer for your project. Most of the time different designers can also mean a visible lack of consistency in your designs. Every designer has a unique style and another might not essentially be able to replicate this. But for strong branding, your designs need to look consistent.
The teams assigned for the Graphics plan, Graphics Premium and Graphics Pro plans, and the motion graphics team all work in different time zones. If you are located in a different time zone, expect some delays in communication. In such cases, the real-time Slack collaboration option is not of much use.
Even the customer support teams are not available round the clock. So, communicating with the Design Pickle team can be difficult for businesses in some time zones.
“Design Pickle is most helpful with providing quick turnarounds for some of the last-minute design requests we receive from clients, but it also helps with tracking projects and working with a very talented team. I also like the option to pick from stock imagery or allow the designer to choose the stock imagery they feel works best with the design based on the details provided.”
-Derek D.
“Design Pickle is by far the best outsourced creative services provider! The designers are talented, always responsive and patient. You can toss a dozen changes their way, and they accommodate in a professional timely manner every time.”
-Natalia Matthews
So, what do we think of Design Pickle? It’s one of the best unlimited graphic design services for brands looking for exceptional design quality and a dependable team of designers. You can also manage your projects intuitively through the platform and forget worrying about keeping track of your design workflow. But yes, the expensive pricing of the plans is something that small brands should think about. There are several other credible design subscription providers with much more affordable plans. If budget is not your problem, there’s no other major issue with respect to choosing Design Pickle for your design outsourcing solution.
