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If your print shop has an art department, you know how important it is to get things out on time to make your customers happy and you happy. Not-Missing-Deadlines:It makes everybody happy!™

The longer a design request sits in your art department, the more money you are losing plain and simple. The goal should be to juggle as many design jobs at the same time while still meeting all of your deadlines in an efficient manner. So how can you take on more work while still meeting deadlines?

First…A Story

Fun runs. Usually they make you think of fun and running. But to a screen printer it means lots of shirts, lots of money, and lots of sponsors. Sponsors that will be filling the backs of said fun run shirts. The artwork on the front of the shirt might be fun to create and look at but on the back you have to worry about which logo goes where, who gets prime shirt location because they gave more money, and worst of all WHERE ARE THE VECTOR LOGOS YOU ASKED FOR?!

Every year at my print shop we do charity walk shirts for a very large foundation. Hundreds of cities across America participate in this specific charity and each individual city has their own set of sponsor logos that go on the back of their city’s walk shirt. This meant hundreds of unique shirt orders and thousands and thousands of logos that we had to receive and arrange on each city’s shirt. A smaller city might have only 3 sponsor logos that needed to print on their shirts but the next city might have 30 sponsors for theirs.

The sales person in charge of this large account always asked the charity coordinators to give them vector artwork or high resolution versions of their logos but when you’re dealing with this many businesses, most of them don’t even know what that means or they’ve never had print ready files. So they just send you whatever 10 x 15 px gif they have on their website and think there’s no way it will possibly look like cat vomit printed on a shirt.

We used to have to recreate all of these logos in one color in Adobe Illustrator so that they looked nice and we could use them next year when some of these same logos might need to be reused. But it took our art department all day to churn these out and pissed our customers off when they got the bill for all of that art time.

So we started outsourcing all of that logo recreation to offshore companies in India. And when we realized how much time they were saving us we started outsourcing a lot more of our art jobs so we could save even more time.

Is Outsourcing the Right Decision for Me?

I’m not sure if this is controversial anymore but at the time I was shocked. As a graphic designer, being told by my boss to stop what I was doing and send my design job to a foreign country to be finished by a stranger for pennies on the dollar felt blasphemous. It felt…I dont know…treasonous? I had some unspoken artist design code to uphold and it didn’t feel right. I mean I was literally making myself obsolete. Why would anyone need me to make their art anymore when they could get the same thing overnight for a fraction of the price.

Let me tell you right now when I look back on my reluctance to outsource my design work, I feel stupid. I wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for outsourcing. Sometimes there’s just not enough hours in the day to juggle all of the design jobs we have coming in. When you work on these repetitive and menial tasks yourself, you are wasting your company’s time and more importantly you are wasting a ton of money.

I have now worked with 3 different outsourcing companies in India and what they have done for my job as a graphic designer is heroic.

How do I use offshore outsourcing?

Okay so back to my example above about recreating all of those sponsor logos. Once I got a system in place, all I needed to do was gather up all of the sponsor logos for a particular shirt, attach them to an email, and give very simple instructions. My instructions were usually just something like “Please recreate the attached logos as vector art in spot color black with halftones. Please refer to this purchase order number when returning the vectorized logos”.

Keep in mind, the whole point of this is to save you time and you are only going to do the opposite if you micromanage every little component of a task. You’ll need to let your offshore designer do their thing BUT also keep in mind no one can read your mind. Give as many examples and as much instruction as you can to help your offshore designer see what you are after.

There’s a delicate balance between micromanaging a task until its no longer beneficial to outsource it and not giving enough information and wasting time going back and forth with revisions.

They would then work on vectoring the logos for us overnight while we slept and return them within 24 hours for just a few dollars. All I had to do was rearrange the logos on a shirt mock up and then print them when it got approved. This saved us a ton of money and allowed our art department to handle more orders.

What artwork should my art department outsource?

You should outsource almost all of your artwork. Seriously like 90% of the design jobs you get for screen printing can probably be sent offshore. That might seem crazy but the more you outsource the more you are able to get done in your role as a graphic designer. I got to the point where I would look at a job order, read the instructions and immediately see that it could be outsourced and I could get it back in the morning.

Say for example it’s a job with clear directions where maybe a school wants you to put their logo that you already have on file, on a t-shirt with some typesetting, and then they have a list of names in an Excel spreadsheet that they want to go on the back of the shirt. At that point all you will need to do is attach the school’s vector logo to an email along with the Excel spreadsheet and let them know what the customer’s instructions are. In 24 hours you will have a completed design in your inbox with only about a minute’s worth of time on your part. Your role of graphic designer is now much more important.

Your role at your print shop is now “Project Manager” and you are now a job completing machine.

Your new role as a “Project Manager”

You might think that outsourcing away all of these assignments is a bad idea and goes against why you came on as a graphic designer in the first place. Keep in mind you are still the designer and the creative drive behind everything that comes through your department. Keep the assignments that look fun to yourself or need your specialized design skills to get the job done. If you get assigned a job and it asks you to illustrate a skull biting a motorcycle in half while riding a tank, then you should probably do that job yourself. Since you’ve outsourced all of the repetitive small tasks, you’ll have more time to make that skull tank illustration even more badass and you’ll get it completed on time.

Don’t assume you are taking yourself out of the design workflow. Your expertise as a designer is still important to make sure these outsourced jobs get done right. Find the component of a customer’s design request that can be split up, where you take the more difficult and creative part of the job and outsource the stuff you don’t need to do yourself.

For Example

Or you might get a job where you can take a design that you’ve already created and send it offshore and give them instructions to replace elements of the design with new elements. Almost like using an old design file as a template. For example let’s say you get a design request with instructions that simply tell you to put a lion on a shirt with a team name above and the words “Champions 2015” underneath. You remember you have an old design that could be used as a template for this new design request that you did last year where there was a Jaguar logo and a different school name and it said something else underneath. Now all you need to do is attach that design to an email, tell your offshore designers what to replace, maybe what fonts to use, and once again you quickly have a design back to you in about 24 hours while you move on to the next assignment. This way you are still the creative driving force behind your projects and you’ve art directed the whole job without having to do the dirty work.

As a project manager, you’ll be able to juggle more design jobs at the same time and you’ll make yourself a lot more valuable to your print shop employer. You may have to make some slight tweaks to get your artwork looking just right but you’ll save yourself so much time up front and all the heavy lifting is done for you. You just have to make sure you are giving clear instructions and making your offshore designer’s job easier by providing them any artwork or templates they might need to get the job done.

Outsourcing Saves Time and Money

I know it might seem wrong at first, but if your print shop is not outsourcing any of its artwork, it is losing money and time doing everything entirely in-house. There are a ton of awesome offshore designers out there who are willing to do an awesome job for you and they will get it done for less than what you will pay an in-house graphic designer hourly. The in-house designer of course is still key in managing the job and getting it done correctly. Now you just have a huge team at your disposal that can work on designs while you’re sleeping.

Remember this: if you are starting a print shop from home and you are your only employee, doing the printing, artwork, accounting, and sales all on your own is just asking for a big fat nervous breakdown. Do whatever you can to hand those jobs off to someone else.

So look around online to find out which outsourcing company is a good fit for you. You might need to try out a few to see if you work well with them. Make sure you get all of the proper info so you will know how to send and receive communication with them and what kind of info you need to be including when requesting artwork services.

If anybody is interested, those 3 different outsourcing companies I’ve worked with are Nittany, Clariya, and RR Donnelly and I couldn’t get all of my work done without them.

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