Guides
Practical guides on briefing, selecting, contracting and working with
design studios, written for SaaS teams doing it for the first time.
Most people hiring a design studio are doing it for the first time, often under time pressure, usually without a procurement process built for creative work. The listings on this site tell you who exists. These guides cover the part nobody writes down: how to brief the work, how to run a selection that does not take three months, what belongs in the contract, and how to tell afterwards whether it worked.
Written from what actually goes wrong. Every guide is specific enough to act on today.
Before you hire
Agency, freelancer, or in-house hire
The three options solve different problems and cost differently over a year, not a quarter. When a freelancer is genuinely the right call, when an agency earns its overhead, and the point at which hiring becomes cheaper than either.
How to write a design brief that gets useful proposals
Vague briefs produce identical proposals, which forces you to choose on rapport. What to include, what to leave open deliberately, and why stating your budget range gets you better proposals rather than higher ones.
Setting a budget before you talk to anyone
How to arrive at a number you can defend internally, what changes the figure most, and how to tell whether a quote is high for the work or high for the studio.
Choosing a studio
Running a selection in four weeks
A week-by-week process: longlist, brief, shortlist, calls, references, decision. Built to end with a defensible choice rather than an exhausted one.
Red flags in agency pitches
The patterns that predict a difficult engagement. Senior people at the pitch who vanish afterwards, portfolios with no boring screens, proposals that skip discovery, and reluctance to name a project that went badly.
How to check references properly
Most reference calls confirm what you already decided. The questions that produce useful answers, who to ask for beyond the two names offered, and what a studio's refusal to arrange calls actually tells you.
Working together
Engagement models compared
Project, retainer, subscription, and embedded. Which shape fits which kind of work, and why paying project rates for continuous work is the most common way design budgets disappear.
What belongs in a design contract
Source file ownership, named teams and change notification, notice periods, and handover scope. The clauses people forget are the ones that cause disputes.
Working with a distributed or overseas studio
Overlap hours, review cadence, and the practical differences that decide whether a time-zone gap is an advantage or a tax.
After the work
Design handover: what to demand
The difference between receiving files and receiving something your team can maintain. Documentation, contribution processes, training, and who owns the work in month twelve.
Measuring design work
Metrics that survive a budget review, agreed before the work starts and baselined. Why satisfaction scores are the weakest option and what to use instead for product, website, and brand work.
Have a question these do not answer? Ask us directly and we will either answer it or write the guide.