Design outsourcing feels like the most practical thing to do when you have an ever-increasing design workload. But what should you do if you can’t spare the time and effort it takes to vet freelance designers or design agencies for all your designs? An unlimited graphic design service is your answer. And while talking about unlimited design subscription services, ManyPixels is a popular name that comes up.
Should you choose ManyPixels as your unlimited design service provider? Will the service fulfill the unique design requirements of your brand? Let’s find out from this ManyPixels review.
ManyPixels was founded in the year 2018. Back then the design subscription realm was still in its growing phase. Within the short span, the service has grown consistently expanding its reach. Today, ManyPixels has worked with more than 3000 customers from around the world.
Headquartered in Singapore, ManyPixels has a global team catering to clients from different time zones. With its customer-first approach, ManyPixels believes that “Great design is not a luxury”.
So, what kind of plans does ManyPixels offer and how can this help businesses from various industries scale? Let’s get into our ManyPixels review right away.
$549/month
$899/month
$1,199/month
ManyPixels with its diverse plans makes a good choice for businesses looking for a consistent inflow of designs to keep their marketing workflow running smoothly.
We would like to right away establish the fact that motion graphics and video editing are not part of the scope of the services offered by ManyPixels. But it does help with a wide range of graphic design types.
A few of the design types that ManyPixels can create are:
And more!
In addition to the traditional marketing and branding designs ManyPixels also helps with simple web design (based on wireframes or existing websites) and landing page design.
Though motion graphics is not part of the scope, ManyPixels can create basic animated GIFs less than 5 seconds long.
What’s not included:
It’s always a good idea to look into the full list of services covered in a design subscription because each design subscription in the market has a different scope when it comes to design.
Like most other unlimited graphic design services, ManyPixel also supports a one-on-one demo. After all, it’s important to understand the workflow and the kind of input and effort required from your end. It doesn’t help if after paying a monthly fee you have to spend days figuring out where to place your request. ManyPixels eliminates this issue with its free demo of the platform and the process.
ManyPixels has an easy and quick signup process that only takes minutes. The service provides no free trial option and so to create your account and start placing your requests you need to have chosen a subscription and made the payment for it.
When you create a new brand profile, the platform lets you upload your brand assets and also fill in the details about your brand colors, fonts, preferred visual style, competitor, target audience, and other information.
If you have brand guidelines, updating the information in your brand profile is quite easy. But if you do not have one, ManyPixels can support you in creating a brand guide for future use. You can place a new design request detailing your preferred format and the brand assets to include in your brand guidelines.
With your brand profile in place, you can start placing your design requests. ManyPixels does not offer designated designers with its Advanced and Business plans. So, based on the type of design requested and the availability of designers a random designer is assigned to your project.
You can submit your design request in a few simple steps. Fill in the online forms displayed when you choose to create a new request. These include details about the type of design required, the respective brand profile to be incorporated, file format, and other details that help your designer know exactly what you are looking for.
Once your designer is allocated based on your request, the designer starts working on your designs. You can track the progress of your requests, rearrange priorities by moving items up and down or even pause requests all from the queue on your dashboard. Once your designs are ready, they are moved to the Delivered tab after which you can either request revisions or mark the task complete.
ManyPixels only supports 1 active task and therefore your design requests are fulfilled as per the queue. Revisions are pushed to the top of the queue. If that does not seem to keep up with your design requirements the slightly more Business plan supports 2 daily outputs.
ManyPixels provides truly-unlimited plans. Which means that all of its plans support unlimited designs, unlimited revisions, and unlimited brand profiles as well.
With some unlimited graphic design services, there are plans where there’s no limit on the design requests or revisions but for extra brand profiles, you need to upgrade your plan. But that’s not the case with ManyPixels.
And this can be a huge plus for marketing agencies and marketers. Sometimes, it so happens that marketers handling marketing content for their many clients might need a few designs created for each brand.
In such cases, upgrading a plan or choosing multiple subscriptions might be pointless because the design volume required for individual clients might not be too much. But the combined volume of designs for all clients put together might make design subscriptions a cost-effective option. For instances like these, affordable subscriptions with unlimited brand profiles, as in the case of ManyPixesl, make the most sense.
ManyPixels has a huge online library of royalty-free icons and illustrations. These are free to download and use. You do not have to have a ManyPixels subscription to access these. They are directly available on the website for instant download. They come in handy when you have to provide references or even make small tweaks to your design from your end. Since you get the source files for all your designs, you can customize them later if required.
2500+ royalty-free icons
2500+ royalty-free illustrations
Most of the best unlimited graphic design services offer money-back promises. The idea is simple – you start by picking a plan and paying for it. And within the said period if things go sideways, you can request a full refund of the paid subscription fee.
With ManyPixels it is a 14-day money-back promise which means that you get to explore the services for 14 days thoroughly and then make a decision of proceeding with the next month’s subscription or backing off with a refund.
Some unlimited design services only offer these money-back promises on bulk payments like quarterly and annual bills. Without understanding the service well and without knowing if the service will meet your design requirements, you are making a huge expense upfront. But that’s not the case with ManyPixels. The money-back promise is applicable to all plans and even if you choose to pay just for the first month. It’s a smaller risk compared to the case of making a quarterly payment.
Some unlimited design services do not let you interact with your designers. There is a single point of contact to convey your information. But with ManyPixels, since there are different designers assigned to your requests you can directly communicate with the respective designers through the chat window on the ManyPixels platform.
The chat window also lets you send screen recordings for clear communication of the message. But yes, real-time communication is not possible unless you are in the same time zone as your designer.
Based on the production schedule of ManyPixels the team is only available from Monday through Friday. Moreover, the customer support team as well as the design teams are only available during specific time slots in the US EST, Indochina, and EET time zones. Businesses operating in other time zones might miss out on instant responses in their convenient time slots.
Moreover, real-time communication through Slack is only available in US Easter and Central European time. This again brings in the chances of delays in your message reaching your design team and the design team’s queries on your designs reaching you late. All of these added to the turnaround time can cause unnecessary delays in the design process.
One of the main reasons brands prefer having a designated designer is that each designer’s perception of your brand and their perception of your design brief varies. Consequently, their interpretation of your designs varies too. So, if there are different designers working on your designs, your designs might end up looking inconsistent in terms of visual style.
A clear and accurate design brief can help minimize the risk of inconsistencies but a designated designer is the best solution. With ManyPixels you need to choose the most expensive among the 3 plans, the Designated Designer plan for this.
There are mixed reviews for ManyPixels in most places, especially with respect to the quality of work. But the good thing is that most of these reviews also talk about how quickly the team responds to feedback and makes the essential changes to enhance the quality of work. Here are some reviews from ManyPixels customers:
“While dealing with ManyPixels, we have faced some issues with the quality of work, which is not ideal; however, the team has always been happy to help fix any problems we have had.”
-Thomas Smith
“Very happy with the designs. I run a few e-com brands. We use ManyPixels for product imagery, ads, social media graphics, and even for logos when we experiment with new brands. We really like that we can tap into different designers for our different design projects. Their platform is super easy to use.”
-Gauthier T.
Display ad
Infographics
Logo design
Stationery set
Overall, based on the design samples and customer reviews, we understand why ManyPixels continues to be among the top choices for businesses looking for unlimited graphic design services. The starting price of the subscription ($549/month for Advanced) is more or less similar to most other subscriptions with a similar scope.
But the fact that you have to pay $350 more just to add 1 extra daily output and more than double the price of the basic plan for a designated designer can be an issue for small businesses or solopreneurs with a tight budget but a large volume of design requirements. And the fact that the service does not include motion graphics means that you might need to look for another agency to fulfill your video design requirements if they add up in the future.
Leaving out these aspects, ManyPixels is a great choice for anyone looking for a fuss-free way to handle all kinds of marketing designs and branding designs in one place.