Create Visual Assets for Social Channels and Collaboration Platforms [Use Case]

There’s more to good design than just looking nice. A well-executed design strategy helps create and maintain a unified brand image across all your touch points. It can also increase usability and conversions and even improve your search visibility. Getting the design assets right is especially important for businesses that are just establishing or are expanding their online presence.

Why Good Visual Assets Are Important

In addition to well-known social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, many organizations rely on company intranets or collaboration software such as Jive, Microsoft Teams, or Facebook Workplace to streamline workflows and communicate with contractors, customers, and users through branded, external communities. All these channels and platforms require an array of visual assets that represent your brand.

These assets can include:

• Banners to let users know where they are.
• Logos to identify individual teams or products.
• Icons for navigation.
• Infographics or other promotional content.
• Screenshots and other content to highlight new features or help users troubleshoot issues.

These assets take time, resources, and talent to produce. As your organization expands across social channels and communities, the number of design assets required can quickly escalate, as every platform has its own specifications and best practices. If you already have an in-house design team, they may not have the bandwidth to develop and maintain these assets, especially if you’re also trying to get new products out the door.

Finding the Right Remote Talent to Create Assets

Fortunately, creating design assets for your social channels and collaboration spaces is an ideal task for remote talent. These freelance professionals can develop assets while your in-house design team stays focused on higher-order projects. And since these projects aren’t likely to be ongoing, engaging a freelancer can also be a cost-effective solution.

Here are some examples of one-off projects a freelance graphic designer might be perfect for:

1. Developing a set of high-quality assets according to your brand guidelines. If you’re moving to a new channel or platform, you’re going to need assets that conform to your brand’s guidelines while also meeting each platform’s preferred specifications and best practices. These highly technical tasks are ideally suited to a freelance designer who can use his or her design know-how to make sure your brand looks great wherever it’s found.
2. Creating reusable templates for infographics, pull quotes, and other assets. We all know striking visuals are a great way to get your content to stand out, but producing that imagery takes time and talent. A good freelance designer, though, can help develop a strong set of templates (or use templates you’ve already created) to efficiently produce high-quality assets for any channel or platform, whether they’re stylized quotes for your Instagram feed, infographics to share on Twitter, or annotated screenshots to go on your Jive community.
3. Refreshing out-of-date assets as needed. Whether you’re going through a rebranding or merely tweaking assets for seasonal promotions, updating your favicons, logos, cover photos, and banners across all your channels and platforms eats up valuable time. An experienced freelance designer can take charge of these assets so that your in-house designers can concentrate on their major responsibilities.

That said, if you are looking for someone to create high-quality assets for your social channels or branded communities on a regular basis, you may want to establish a relationship with a designer who knows your organization’s branding guidelines as well as the constraints of each platform and network.

If you have questions about budgeting, check out our guide to hiring graphic designers.

Interviewing Freelance Professionals and Starting with a Sample Project

When it comes time to interview freelance design professionals for your project, make sure they understand your brand’s guidelines as well as your goals for the community that they’ll be designing for. Is it primarily a marketing channel? A customer support channel? An informational resource?

Once you’ve decided to move forward, consider starting out with a small project to see how the freelancer works. Does he or she follow the brief? Does the work meet your quality expectations? Is the freelancer communicative and easy to work with? From there, you can put together a more detailed timeline for the remaining deliverables.