Graphic design outsourcing gains ground among Catalan SMEs as an alternative to in-house hiring

Increasingly, small and medium-sized Catalan companies are opting to outsource their graphic design department instead of taking on their own staff. This trend responds to a specific need: to have professional visual communication —brand identity, social media content, commercial materials— without the fixed costs or rigidity of maintaining a full-time dedicated team.This formula is primarily materialized through two models that are gaining traction in the Catalan business landscape: "graphic design outsourcing" and, more recently, "Design as a Service".

Graphic design outsourcing involves delegating the execution of a company's creative needs —from visual identity to the production of marketing materials— to a specialized external team, whether it's an agency or a freelance collaborator. The company maintains control over strategy and brand direction, while the creative work is handled by an "External Partner".

This model allows SMEs to access a team with different specializations —brand design, editorial design, digital design— without having to undertake the selection process or bear the fixed cost of covering each of these disciplines with their own staff.

The most recent evolution of this model is Design as a Service, a system whereby the company contracts continuous access to a design team through a periodic fee, instead of negotiating and budgeting each project individually.

"We increasingly speak with marketing managers who are unaware of alternatives to hiring in-house staff or relying on a single freelancer for everything. Design as a Service allows them to have a design team always available, at a predictable monthly cost, in the same way they already manage other digital tools for their company," explains the founder of Agencia DODO, a graphic and web design agency based in Barcelona.

The Catalan business landscape, composed mainly of SMEs and micro-enterprises, finds in these models a response to two common limitations: the difficulty of finding a single profile that covers all the design disciplines a brand needs, and the variability in creative workload throughout the year, with peaks during campaigns or launches and periods of lower activity.

According to industry sources, this trend is part of a broader movement towards "access" models versus "ownership" models in business resource management, similar to what has already been established in areas such as technological infrastructure or management software.