If you are a graphic designer that generates your own business and leads, it may be tempting at times when you are busy to outsource some of your work, particularly when some of the overseas designers in India and other countries offer such comparatively cheap rates.
There are no shortage of offers coming in through your email spam, and it is often true that you can obtain some good prices overseas. But there are a few problems that may be encountered.
The main issue seems to be with general communication due to language differences. Although the overseas outsource may speak english, being a second language and having different customs can cause great difficulties in understanding. Having sent through a clear and thorough brief, your proof may come back with variations that do not match up with your specific instructions at all. If you aren’t careful with reviewing all the details of the proof you have received, you may end up forwarding a very inaccurate proof to your client who may not be at all impressed.
Even having reviewed the proof first and sent back instructions to correct mistakes, oftentimes still the proof will come back wildly inaccurate. It can take many emails and phone calls back and forth to obtain what you requested with your original brief in the first place. So you then need to consider the amount of time this has taken you and balance out whether it was worth the savings in cost. Not only this, but in some cases the overseas designer may charge extra for the further changes to be made, blowing out your original estimate.
This may be a generalization, I can only speak from my experience and that of those around me. By all means there may be designers out there that do not encounter these problems having found someone reliable AND very cost effective to assist from overseas. And I’d love to hear about it! But thus far I’ve had to wonder at whether it’s been worth the effort.
Lisa is a graphical and pre-press designer with more than 15 years experience. She runs her own agency Twilight Emerald from Ballarat, Victoria Australia.
The two logos above are a good example of the process of converting from an illustration to a vector and a situation in which this process might need to be employed. There are different approaches to this and I thought I’d share using this example to highlight them.
In this instance, a shire council in rural Victoria, Australia held a competition asking local young people to help choose their logo and visual identity which was to be used on their website and also offline in their print masthead and other materials including large signs. The winning “logo” design, pictured top, happened to be hand drawn in felt-tipped pen (or texta). To be used professionally and to be resized, an amateur design such as this has to be converted into a vector format.
Twilight Emerald was employed to supply the vector art and the result, pictured below, was a manual trace using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.
Although Illustrator also has ‘Live Trace’, personally I find it currently doesn’t do a great job for anything even slightly complex. The original illustration just doesn’t look quite the same using that process alone. The Live Trace can work with artistic renditions of a photos, or if a job doesn’t need to be exact. But you can’t beat a manual trace for real attention to detail and accuracy. The final product is far more editable as well. For example, you could change spot colours in specific areas of the illustration to create. Not every designer is up to the task of a manual trace so clients need to be selective of designers with this capability.
Have any experiences with illustrations to vector ? Prefer to use Live Trace or Manual Trace ? If so please feel free to share:”
Lisa is a graphical and pre-press designer with more than 15 years experience. She runs her own agency Twilight Emerald from Ballarat, Victoria Australia.
Here are some great little football (Australian) illustrations and icons which can be used for logos for Aussie Rules Footy (AFL) clubs or websites.
There are two variations, both available for just $1.
The second set of 4 are icons designed to be used with logos. They can easily have text added across the football with your aussie rules league or club name.
You can download them here and here.
Lisa is a graphical and pre-press designer with more than 15 years experience. She runs her own agency Twilight Emerald from Ballarat, Victoria Australia.
