When building a startup, designer needs prove to be at the same time indispensable, urgent, and often, a pain in the a**. From our experience of choosing between outsourcing and in-house designers and handling a designer teams on a daily basis, we came up with these advice to help you work in a creative and peaceful atmosphere. Enjoy! These slides were originally created by Alex Delivet (@alexd) for a presentation at BlendWeb in France.

1. Working with designers

2. When building a startup, designer needs
prove to be at the same time indispensable,
urgent, and often, a pain in the a**.
From our experience of choosing between
outsourcing and in-house designers and
handling a designer teams on a daily basis,
we came up with these advice to help you
work in a creative and peaceful atmosphere.
Enjoy!

3. The (almost) impossible
dilemma
outsourcing
vs
in-house

4. #1 Reason pro outsourcing
freelance and
agencies are
cheaper.

5. #2 Reason pro outsourcing
designers needs are intermittent
Logo, graphic ID Website V2 That small stuff you tried
to do yourself

6. #3 Reason pro outsourcing
greater ability to choose among
different styles and genres

7. but wait…
can it be that simple?

8. here’s why we rule for in-house

9. #1 Reason pro in-house
a design team will enable you to
iterate to find your market fit (yes, it
implies a smart product design)

10. for instance

11. Frontapp, v1

12. Frontapp, v2

13. Frontapp, v3
building a collaborative inbox required a lot of tests, beta-users
feedback and UX science.

14. #2 Reason pro in-house
it places the whole
company in a
pixel-perfect
attitude: attention
to detail, quality
in execution.

15. for instance

16. that’s a
regular
job offer

17. that’s a
pixel-perfect
job offer

18. #3 Reason pro
in-house
A beautiful product is the tip of the
iceberg: all teams inside the company
feel motivated by compliments on a
design made by their teammates.

19. look at us all proud of our beautifully-designed hoodie
(yep, that’s a designer sitting on the throne)

20. once you have
your own design team,
you need to handle it

21. dos & don’ts
when working with a design team

22. Don’t be the annoying plumber client
Do not dictate your designers what they should do specifically. They
are the ones who know better what solutions would fit your
problems. Just like a plumber knows best how to fix a leak.

23. for instance

24. I thought I could make an
infographics.
Designers do infographics.

25. Don’t let designer only do design
Designers should be implicated
on other tasks than strictly
product or graphic design. Their
creative minds can be a strong
asset on other topics, such as
management or marketing (just
like a rational developer’s mind
can be an asset on more creative
topics).

26. for instance

27. We were looking for a way to encourage our teams
to collaborate more. We were using Slack but it
wasn’t enough: the idea to build our own virtual
currency for ‘thankyous’ - called the Briqs - came
from our design team. Today, we even have our own
online shop!

28. Don’t leave a designer alone
Designers need to be
challenged and
brainstorm a lot. If
you can’t hire several
designers yourself,
think of joining a
shared office and
have designers in the
same room, or
encourage sharing
their work on
Dribbble.

29. Don’t interrupt a designer
that’s what our designers posted on their door

30. Do let designers have a creative
environment that inspires them
even if it’s messy or outside the office

31. Don’t say things like:
‘Come on, it will only take two minutes’
‘I would even do it myself…’
‘Can’t you just use Paint?’
That shall go straight to the
Friday-night’s-beers jar

32. Do work in sprints:
Set goals each 1 or 2 weeks so that your designers can
organize themselves freely in that timeframe.
Creativity comes and
goes: you can’t force
them to be productive
every hour. Half a day
a week should be used
for self-learning and
exploration.

33. Do have backlog tasks in stock
If a designer is stuck
on a task you asked
him/her to do, suggest
to do something else
(preferably low priority
and low boredom).

34. for instance

35. build a visual ID for a future event, paint a wall in your
office, improve social media covers…

36. the perfect
toolbox for people working with
designers

37. Trello is a perfect project management tool if
your work in sprints. We use 1 board per project
and have a specific board for design.

38. UXPin is a great mockup tool that has
collaborative and advanced features. At
eFounders, we follow 2 rules: ‘everything that’s
integrated shall be designed’ and ‘everything
that’s designed shall be mockuped’.

39. We use invision for prototyping.
The tool enables us easily build
dynamic mockups.

40. All files are gathered in shared folders, for
each of our projects. We use the enterprise
solution Google Drive (as part of the
Google apps suite).

41. Good tools make good workers.
invest in a good computer, good software, and if needed, a graphic tablet.

42. Thank you!
We are eFounders, startup studio.
@efounders
!
slides made with love by
@alexd
@griveau
@vanierrachel