Where to build a brand design career? Differences between in-house teams and agencies
Hello, my name is Liza Bobkova and I lead a team of designers in the marketing department of the company QIC. Prior to this role, I spent several years as a design lead for marketing teams working on international products. My responsibilities have always included hiring and developing designers, and I often face a significant challenge — candidates often have a poor understanding of what brand designers do on a daily basis within in-house teams, how the processes differ from agencies, and what the specific aspects of daily work entail.
In this article I am going to explore the reasons for this, highlight the differences and provide guidance for those who are unsure about pursuing a career in corporate branding.
Why is that
To begin with, I’ll propose a hypothesis as to why this topic is not well-explored. The trend of having an in-house marketing agency within a corporation in the CIS market emerged in the last 8–10 years. With the advent of super apps, ecosystems, and social networks, companies gained the ability to engage in more day-to-day communication with their audience instead of sporadic advertising campaigns. Prior to this, large brands more often delegated marketing work to agencies, but small companies, if they recognized the need for an in-house designer, could rarely afford to develop this capability. As a result, many talented designers worked and grew primarily in agencies. Consequently, a substantial amount of knowledge is accumulated and transmitted by designers with agency experience. It’s neither good nor bad, but precisely because of this, there is a scarcity of materials that can help designers in developing brand materials within a company or in establishing communication and processes.
What the in-house team works with
If you look at educational channels, blogs or major offline forums for designers, listen to interviews and podcasts, it seems that a designer has only two paths: product design with research, testing and logical flows — for the pragmatic individuals; and brand design with the search for metaphors, profound ideas, typographic and graphic manoeuvres — for the creative minds. There are many lectures on how to create and scale a great concept, how to properly structure the flow in an application or on a website. However, there is very little information on how a design concept should unfold on each medium in the marketing funnel to drive users to the application or website.
There is almost no information on what a marketing funnel is in the context of visual communication and how to work with design at its stages. Ironically, this is exactly what marketing designers in product teams deal with on a daily basis.
Educational materials that delve into the intricacies of each point tend to be aimed at marketers, making it difficult for designers to study them without getting too deeply involved. In my teams, I usually encourage designers to at least familiarise themselves with Kotler’s work. I also ask channel owners to give mini-lectures on each of them, explaining the specifics to the designers.
On the topic of developing style at real touchpoints and its connection to the final product, I recommend starting with Yuri Vetrov’s lectures on branding digital products (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSIv6TZwoRQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRDIyDy3KBE). He is currently exploring this link in more depth.
But marketing mediums are just the tip of the iceberg. In the illustration I have tried to show what internal design teams have to deal with on a daily basis. It depends on the situation and varies from company to company. Typically, however, in-house designers are involved not only in external communications, but also in B2B and HR communications.
I’ve seen different structures — unified design departments where any designer can work on any channel, direction or sub-brand, and fragmented units where each marketing channel or sub-brand has its own design team.
At QIC, we work with the first type: a single team develops the design for two external products and one HR brand. Each designer can take on tasks at any stage, whether it’s conceptual development or creating assets for performance marketing.
What are the features and differences
Many articles help newcomers understand whether to pursue a career in product or brand design by analysing their specific characteristics.
I decided to analyse the specifics of working in brand design in-house, drawing on the experiences of colleagues who have moved between the two, as well as my own experience of working both in agencies and in-house. The differences to product design are quite obvious, and the question of whether to move from in-house to agency and vice versa is more frequently raised. I have therefore focused on highlighting the differences in the work from this perspective.
Deep dive into the product
The most obvious difference is that in an in-house team, designers are working on the same product, constantly observing the same market, audience and competitors, and gaining a better understanding of the whole brand background they’re working with. If the processes in the in-house team are well established, by the time a style, campaign or even a single layout brief comes in, the designers are already familiar with most of the details and immersed in the context. This allows them to understand the brief much more accurately and to formulate questions and hypotheses.
It’s a different story in agencies — projects change quickly and industries can vary drastically. Designers need to be able to switch gears and quickly grasp the context in which a business operates.
Access to research, time to test and experiment
Here, designers’ processes and roles are much more aligned with product design. In-house brand designers tend to do less independent research and often rely on the results of studies conducted by analysts. There is an opportunity to work with colleagues from marketing or product teams to conduct A/B testing of advertising and visual solutions. The designer should be able to analyse them, formulate hypotheses and draw conclusions from the test for, say, a promotional email or flyer.
In agencies, the ability to do research is crucial, but there’s usually limited time for testing and experimentation, unless there’s a specific focus on certain channels. In in-house environments, there may also be a lack of time for extensive testing. In such cases, it is common practice to have several previously validated hypotheses and visual solutions from previous tests in reserve.
Style and brand experimentation
When it comes to teams within larger companies, as opposed to small start-ups, it’s worth noting that there are certain limitations to experimenting with the visual aspect. There’s always a brand behind you, with its tone of voice, strategy, target audience and a certain number of approvals; within this framework, some visual experiments may simply be impossible. Of course, the same constraints can apply to designers in agencies. But in agencies, projects come and go, and finally you find that coveted client who trusts you completely and allows you to experiment boldly.
Monitoring of implementation
An agency creates a concept, sells it beautifully to the client, wraps the style elegantly in a case and moves on to the next client. In an ideal scenario, conscientious designers in the agency prepare a style for different touchpoints, taking into account their specificities, and hand it over to the client’s in-house design team, which then supports it just as beautifully.
However, the real situation may be different. A year later, a designer from the agency stumbles across a layout in real life and sends it to the agency chat with the question, “What have they done to my design?”. There could be several answers — the client doesn’t have an in-house design team, different teams implement the style from project to project, the brand book fell into the hands of a weak designer, or it turned out to be a challenge to apply to the client’s real tasks — legal requirements, tight deadlines, a lack of creativity or printing issues killed the profound idea. As the author of the style, you may have fought against these challenges because it’s precious to you, like a child. On the other hand, you may not have paid as much attention to the visual aspect, or you may not have found the resources to maintain the concept. All that’s left is a beautiful case on Behance.
The in-house designers are involved in the process of developing the style from the moment the company creates the brief for them, and they never let go. It’s an ongoing process of refining guidelines and templates. If they find that the style is hindering efficiency, they work out how to simplify the system. If there isn’t enough variability, they work on new approaches within the design system or think about how to improve it. If there are a lot of legal texts, they treat them as constants and find a permanent place for them. Every successful or unsuccessful layout can be captured, analysed to understand why it turned out that way, and corrective action can be taken, even if the layout was created by an outsourced team.
But from here comes the next point — a lot of routine
Returning to each stage and having the opportunity to adjust and work on improvements is incredibly valuable. For some, however, this deep immersion in detail may seem routine. In your hands, it’s the same endless case, spiced up with the occasional special promotional project. In front of you, the same style and, more often than not, the same ad formats. It’s not the same adrenaline-fueled challenges for the brain as in agencies, where a new client urgently needs 3 style concepts by Thursday because the strategy and key message changed completely on Monday.
For an in-house team, it’s crucial to set challenges for themselves to avoid getting stuck in existing guidelines and the past, even if everything is fine in the present. Often these challenges come from the business strategy or feedback from colleagues and clients.
Access to management and owners, leading to greater trust
As I mentioned earlier, we are often involved in work at the stage of discussing it with the business, and this is a key difference between in-house and agencies. In agencies, there is often a buffer of several people between the designer and the decision-makers on the client side, making it very difficult to communicate your doubts or hypotheses about how to improve communication. In a large company with well-established processes, the design leader will not only delegate tasks downwards, but also communicate thoughts, doubts or team initiatives upwards. In small in-house teams, designers almost always have the opportunity to communicate their thoughts directly to each task owner and get answers to questions much faster. In-house designers simply inspire more confidence in management than designers from external teams.
But management also has access to you
This is the flip side of the coin — if you can reach management or the task owner faster, be prepared for them to reach you with a single message in Slack. While a good project manager in an agency can help manage the flow of comments, requests and suggestions from designers, in a company this role is usually played by well-established processes and team leadership. But the value for in-house teams is that they are always available and can get things done much faster than an agency with a queue of other projects. In our team, I always try to maintain a balance — for designers, direct communication with task managers is a must, but I keep the workload of the team and the context of that communication under control. Urgent new tasks and changes in priorities for some existing tasks occur every week, but we allocate a percentage of time for such changes in the schedule to avoid stressing designers out with frequent changes.
And the last point is quite down-to-earth
The rapid turnover of projects in agencies is not only driven by the client’s beloved “needed yesterday” deadline. Agencies have to keep up this pace to survive, grow and pay staff, and few agencies can afford to work long and hard on a project for a lot of money. Client budgets for marketing and design are the first to be cut in times of crisis, dragging agency budgets and staff down with them.
But don’t be fooled by the idea that you can relax in an IT company with perks and biscuits. Last year, with layoffs even at FAANG companies, made this very clear. Companies have their own KPIs and performance criteria, even for design teams. The solution to protect yourself from market fluctuations is the same for designers in agencies — give it your best shot.
How to make a decision
What is chaos and disorganisation to one designer may be freedom and creative disorder to another. That’s why I don’t emphasise these points as obvious pros or cons. The conclusion may sound as if in-house work is more suited to patient individuals who like to delve into details and communication mechanisms, while agency work is for dynamic individuals who need to move from project to project to stay sharp. In reality, however, details and communication mechanisms are important in both directions, and competent leaders or design directors strive to maintain a variety of tasks in in-house teams. The key question is how deeply you are willing to immerse yourself in the related areas that design serves in the business — product, marketing, analytics.
I think it’s worth analysing how important each of these areas is to you, and comparing it to how it’s implemented in the agency or in-house team you’re interviewing with. In my opinion, it is beneficial for every designer to work on both the agency and in-house side at least once. That way you can understand not only what suits you best, but also the specifics of working with visual communication on each side. And you will be able to use this knowledge effectively in the future, regardless of where you choose to work.
