How to Save Money on Graphic Design for Your Small Business

By Crello founder Dimitry Sergeev,

Small business owners are known for wearing many hats — they sell, market, manage customer service, make coffee and write blog posts. Small business owners are also looking to save money, so they cut corners, think outside the box, and burden themselves with work that could be delegated to someone.

This is especially true of creative work, like good graphic design. There’s no arguing how much more effective they are at creating design elements that actually work. Creating effective designs for small businesses just becomes easier with software like Crello which comes preloaded with professionally designed templates of all sorts, from logos to banners and even t-shirt design.

Knowledge of graphic design can be very useful for marketers in visual communication. We have put together a list of tips and tricks to help you get started on the graphic design adventure with the use of helpful software.

1. Start with a great branding

A great logo represents your unique business idea and creates a memorable symbol that represents your vision. Creating a logo is usually outsourced to graphic designers. If you feel creative, you can use a “free” logo making websites, only to discover that they still charge you for downloading your logo.

But why waste your time? With Crello, you simply enter in a search your business niche or a word that describes your business, and smart search engine gives you thousands of professionally-designed logos which you can fully customize to your needs and download for free. And none of those comes with an annoying watermarks!

What’s more, you will be able to create a complete brand kit for your business and save all your brand assets, e.g., a logo, custom fonts, brand colors, any guidelines, in a special area so that one your team can create custom designs on-brand, any time.

2. Create all kinds of marketing content for all platforms and mediums

Instead of rushing a graphic designer to resize a banner to re-use it on Facebook and then as a rectangular banner ad, you can easily do it yourself in Crello Editor thanks to one-click resizing tool. You avoid the need to calculate exact ad banner dimensions and make sure your marketing content comes out perfectly formatted for any ad network or social media platform.

Having a tool at your fingertips that you can use to quickly do simple design tasks without involving outside specialists can save hundreds of hours that you can otherwise spend to grow your business. After all, you as a business owner have the vision of your business in your head. Use it to put it into great designs, and Crello will do all the hard work.

3. Build your brand with business stationery that is perfectly fit for print

With Crello, you can create stylish and modern business stationery such as letterheads and invoices without involving outside graphic designers. Simply choose from thousands of templates that cover every industry and business niche, then customize in drag-and-drop Crello Editor, add your own logo, address, and other details as you see fit. You will find not only hundreds of local fonts – handy if you do business globally – but also print-friendly crop marks and bleed which help you ensure your stationery is ready to go to print

4. Win new customers with posters and banners

Come to think, if you can you can easily design something as tiny as a logo, then for a large-format poster or banner you surely need to head to a designer agency? Wrong. In Crello, you can choose from thousands of professionally-designed posters and banners in various of popular formats, then add your own content, for example, event details, daily special, or a promotion offer, then download them just in the right resolution to send to print. Result? Close to a hundreds of hours you could spend communicating back and forth with an agency, making changes, accepting corrections, and struggling with the right format.

5. Scale your design efforts to a team format

Once your business grows and you feel the need to upgrade your marketing design efforts, you can make use of Crello’s team design format. You don’t need to hire an in-house graphic designer to sit all day and wait to make a small change. You can assemble a global team of freelance designers, combine them in a team in Crello – remember, all your brand assets are already inside! – and allow them to create your marketing and brand visuals as a team from anywhere. What’s more, then can create in their own individual areas and once done, get together and complete the project as a team.

Everywhere, small- and medium-sized businesses are looking for ways to save money and ways to help make graphic design cost-effective and leaner for your business. These days, software like Crello helps savvy business owners to skip the hassle of getting quality designs on a budget.