Tips & Ideas to Cut Your Small Business Design Costs

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Many small businesses can’t afford professional design. Is this a reason to promote your brand with amateur graphics? Definitely not! Learn how to cut small business design costs with these tips and ideas.

How much does a small business logo design cost? What’s the average cost of website design for small businesses? Where to get professional social media designs?

So many questions, so little time. Most business owners juggle lots of different responsibilities, so finding a designer isn’t always a top priority.Moreover, the average salary for graphic designers in the US is around $6,000, and this is often not within a realistic budget range for a small business just starting out. 

Still, there’s no way your business can survive without good graphic design: from your logo and website, to marketing materials, designs need to reflect your brand and speak to your target audience. 

Want to learn how to cut small business design costs? Here are some helpful tips, tools and resources every small business owner should know about! 

Awesome design tools for high-quality social media marketing

If you are running your business’s social media profiles, you know it can be difficult to post content the audience will care about, and still presents your product or service to them. A good option that will enhance your online presence and cut social media design costs is using graphic design tools that are easy, intuitive and have plenty of templates for your SM posts.

Canva

If you still haven’t found out about Canva, the second you see the many templates and typography options you’ll see it’s around you all the time.

Regularly updated with pre-made templates for different social media platforms and print collaterals (as well as many other formats), Canva can be your go-to DIY design tool.

You can edit your designs with the use of free elements, backgrounds, upload your own photos or use stock photos from Canva, and combine fonts from their vast library.

With a Pro subscription, you can use many more of their assets, as well as more advanced tools and work on a project with multiple people at the same time.

Canva is also one of many tools with social media AI image generators. So aside from template, you can also use it to create new graphics.

Coolors

As a non-designer, you probably don’t have a lot of knowledge of colors and how to combine them. Coolors’ color palette generator is a very useful tool that will pick out five colors that fit perfectly for you, and you can easily copy the codes and use them in tools like Photoshop, Illustrator and Canva.

You can lock a color, for example, your brand color, and generate colors that go well with it to create posts for social media. All of this with just a press of the space button.

Image Color Picker

Here is another tool for the Photoshop illiterate: one that tells you what is the color of the picture so you can cover certain elements or make a bigger frame for it to fit a certain dimension.

You just need to hover with your mouse over a part of the picture, and it gives you the RGB and HEX code of that color and shade.

Flaticon

Icons can easily be found and often are royalty-free (with giving credit to the designer, of course), but icon pack can be scattered and hard to pair up. This can jeopardize the consistency of your design, so icon packs such as the ones on Flaticon are a great way to spruce up your web design or social media posts.

ManyPixels Illustration Gallery

Free illustrations that are customizable based on color, and come in five different styles? We’ve got them!

The free illustration gallery at ManyPixels has more than 2.000 illustrations coming in multiple variations and is still growing by the week. It costs nothing and they can be used on landing pages, blog posts, newsletters, social media graphics and more assets suitable for small business marketing.

We also have a free icons gallery, where you can get simple icons ideal for UI design!

Unsplash

There are plenty of stock photo libraries, but Unsplash has a very particular aesthetic: contemporary, conceptual and fitting for a younger audience. The photos are free to use, but you need to credit the author.

The good thing about them is that they are usually enough to post on themselves, without too much tweaking or filters.

Affordable brand identity design

Before you can get anything else done, you’ll need brand design. This means creating a unified visual identity for your brand: from your logo design, to specific design elements, such as colors, fonts, shapes, illustrations, and more. 

Branding consultancies and design agencies can be pretty expensive, albeit thorough and creative. But there are ways to get branding design without breaking the bank

Unlimited graphic design

Unlimited or on-demand design services are monthly or yearly subscription-based platforms that can get you as many projects as you want, unlimited revisions, large scope of work and a dedicated designer that matches best to your requirements.

Some unlimited graphic design services are ManyPixels, Penji, Design Pickle, etc. They are very affordable, with prices ranging from 400 to 1,400 dollars a month, depending on your needs and the number of dedicated designers. So if you consider what’s the average cost of website design for small businesses alone, you’ll realize this is by far the most affordable way to get professional design done. 

For a few hundred dollars, you’ll get a full small business branding package: anything from logo design, branding guidelines, web design, custom illustrations, presentations, social media ads, product packaging, banners, GIFs… And you can request as many revisions as you want, without any extra charges!

Outsourced designers

If you don’t need a design service in the long run and would like to have a one-time project or an outsourced designer on a short-term basis, freelancer platforms can be a great place to start looking.

Upwork, Fiverr, Behance and Dribbble are only some of the places where you can find vetted, experienced and talented designers, charging hourly rates that vary widely (from 20 dollars to several hundreds of dollars for experienced professionals).

However, time management and communication can be a bit of a hassle, and there are no unlimited revisions when working with freelancers.

Design competitions

Throwing a design competition is a cool solution that saves you money and gives up-and-coming designers recognition. For a certain reward, you can get hundreds of designers creating your brand identity on a platform like 99 Designs, for example. They pay fee money to the platform, and you are in charge of rewarding the winner.

Useful builders for small businesses websites

How much does a small business website design cost? The answer is between $1,500 and $5,000, if you hire a freelance designer, or upwards of $10,000 if you go with a web design agency. 

Luckily, there’s more than one way to build a website nowadays, even if you have no design or web development knowledge.

So, whether you need a coffee shop or construction website, here are some of the most popular website builders that allow you to create custom websites for little or even no money at all!

Shopify

Shopify is the perfect destination for an ecommerce website. With dozens of integrations, features and a drag and drop builder, Shopify can help you create an online store and be seen by a global audience.

Its templates are mostly optimized for an ecommerce website, but they also offer great customer support, their own payments platform, payment in plenty of currencies and the ability for a custom domain.

Wix

Wix is a more intuitive and easy-to-use drag and drop builder, which allows you to create a website in a matter of minutes. It supports a free version, however for professional web design, you’ll need to pay their affordable subscription fees to connect a domain name and access different functionalities, such as creating an online store. Otherwise it can be used as a great website mockup tool.

If you don’t have extensive design knowledge, Wix is probably the best website builder to use, thanks to its rich library of high-quality website templates. It also has a pretty powerful AI website design tool.

You can also check out our comparison guide on Wix vs Shopify to see which one is better for you.

Instapage

If you need a landing page rather than a website, Instapage is a perfect solution for you.

Landing pages have a huge impact on your conversion rates and search engine optimization, and ultimately the success of your business. And this is where Instapage is really worth the investment. Instead of hiring a web developer and designer to create each one of these pages, you can easily create dozens of different variations with Instapage. It’s also a very useful tool in a/b testing.

You can choose one of over 200 templates available from Instablock manager, the platform’s page editor. Or you can create a completely custom landing page yourself.

Since the platform operates on a drag and drop model, landing pages and templates are easily customizable. When it comes to ease of use, Instapage is definitely one of the best landing page builders.

Conclusion

If you are only starting your business and cannot dedicate a lot of money to make your marketing and graphic design work, there are plenty of online tools and platforms that can help you create cheap solutions, and teach you how to design on your own.

Of course, some things are easier to do than others. Creating a good logo or professional web design is a task that requires lots of design knowledge and years of experience. So, it’s a good idea to think about getting a professional graphic designer on board to ensure these vital pieces of design are aligned with your brand identity and business goals.

We’ve already mentioned that one of the most affordable ways to get graphic design for small businesses are unlimited graphic design companies. With ManyPixels, you’ll work with a team of vetted and talented graphic designers to create anything, from the simplest things like business cards and presentations, all the way to unique and consistent brand identity or website design.

‍Pick your subscription plan today, and start requesting graphics that will impress potential customers and launch your small business into success!