Unlimited graphic design services help businesses big and small tackle their ever-fluctuating design requirements. No contracts to complicate the collaboration and no surprise design bills to worry about. Ready to try an unlimited graphic design service? Design Shifu is known for its competitively priced plans and comprehensive scope of services. Wondering if this service will be able to help meet your design requirements? Find out from this Design Shifu review.
Founded in 2018 by Hadeel Abu Elhaija, Design Shifu is a U.S.-based company majorly run by women. The idea started small and initially, Hadeel was working on design projects from her home and today the team handles clients on a global level.
The focus of Design Shifu from the time of its inception has been to provide a cost-effective solution for businesses looking to enhance their creative content.
The affordable plans offered by Design Shifu are definitely one of their strengths. But what else makes this service a popular one in the industry? Let’s find out from this Design Shifu review.
$399/month
$599/month
$1499/month
Design Shifu is a good choice for businesses that are looking for all kinds of graphic design services to elevate their social media performance or even take their online advertising to the next level.
Design Shifu has a comprehensive scope of services that cover almost everything required by a brand for marketing, advertising, and branding. Some of the most popular design types that the service takes care of are:
But yes, the entry-level plan does not include several design types like illustrations. So, if you are planning to explore a variety of design styles for your brand, the Unlimited Plus plan will be a better choice.
The Unlimited Pro plan is the ideal option for businesses that are looking to outsource their promotional graphics entirely including social media videos and other motion graphics designs. But remember that video editing is still not part of the scope and Design Shifu also does not help with web and app design and other services.
Having understood what your monthly subscription fees cover, it’s time to understand what the process looks like.
The Design Shifu website does not provide a video demonstration of the service. But yes, the Design Shifu team does support a one-on-one demonstration call if you wish to understand the services before making a decision.
You can invite your team members to the call and connect over the phone or via Zoom. This 30-minute live demonstration is to help you understand what Design Shifu offers and to get an overview of how things work.
After the call, once you have made up your mind about the right plan for your business you can create an account in a few easy steps. Once you provide your contact details and verify your email ID you can proceed with choosing the plan and paying for it. Once all this is complete you can access your custom dashboard and start adding design requests.
The Design Shifu platform is where you manage all your design requests and handle your account-related activities.
Creating your brands will be the first step as this helps your design team understand the kind of colors, fonts, and other visual elements and visual styles to use in your design.
The good news is that Design Shifu assigns a dedicated designer for your project without any additional cost. So, your designers do not change with each request. Therefore, adding a clear brand profile means that the designer who works on your projects on an ongoing basis will understand your brand better.
Placing a design request is easy too. With the brand profiles in place, you can quickly add your design brief by selecting the relevant options in the Design Shifu platform and selecting the brand for which the particular design will be created.
From there on, tracking the progress of the design, requesting revisions as well as downloading the completed design files will be in the same place.
With Design Shifu’s Grab tool, you can instantly mark the design elements you wish to revise or even add screen recordings to help your designer understand the revision required. This makes it easier to reduce any communication gap in the design workflow.
Having spoken briefly about how the process works with Design Shifu let’s now get to the strengths and setbacks of this service.
With the dedicated designers at Design Shifu, most designs are delivered within a 24-hour window. This can be a huge plus for businesses looking to outsource their everyday graphics like social media posts.
There is also a Project Manager to quickly look into any design workflow-related issues and resolve them instantly so as to avoid delays.
In addition to the native dashboard that Design Shifu uses, the service also supports integration with web tools like Asana, Trello, Slack, and Canva. This means that if you have an existing design workflow the transition to an outsourced model will be smooth. And you can also easily automate your tasks like directly saving the finished design files to a specific location.
But to avail of this there is an additional fee incurred every month in addition to your standard monthly subscription cost. This does add up to your design budget.
At first glance, the plans offered by Design Shifu do look affordable and on par with most other unlimited design services. But a few inclusions and exclusions in these plans place them on the slightly more expensive side in comparison.
For example, the Unlimited plan is the most affordable option offered. But this plan only makes sense if you do not need illustrations, GIFs, Presentations, and landing page designs for your campaigns. But since these are design types that most businesses need regularly, the Unlimited Plus plan is a much better option.
But the price of $599/month for the Unlimited Plus plan only covers 1 active request. For 2 active the plan costs double the amount. And finally, to include motion graphics as well, you will be paying $1499/month and the plan does not include video editing. However, there are some unlimited graphic design services that offer unlimited video design plans at a lower cost while covering video editing as well.
Though the customer support team is quick to respond through live chat, you do not always get the answers to your queries directly. Queries through email to the support team are not answered promptly either. This can make it tough to make a decision quickly when you are in the consideration phase or while comparing services to understand which unlimited design service is best for your business.
“Design Shifu has been instrumental in turning the design aspect of the client’s business from being their pain point to one of their strengths. They constantly surprise the client with the quality of their designs. Moreover, they ensure efficient project management and effective communication.”
-Thomas Lehner, Owner, Digital Marketing Agency
“Design Shifu has helped me immensely with my design needs. The team is friendly and quick to respond to all of my requests. I have used them exclusively for the past year and will continue to use them in the future.”
-Faiz Fauzi
Logo
Social media graphics
Custom illustration
GIFs
If you do not mind having designers located in different time zones and therefore missing out on real-time communication with them, Design Shifu is a good choice. In terms of consistent design quality, Design Shifu has impressed quite a few clients, as we can see from some of the client testimonials. On the whole, if you are looking for an unlimited design service that provides a designated designer and supports integration with a variety of productivity tools, then Design Shifu is worth considering.
