I’m currently employed working on rebranding companies product brochures (20+ products and each in 50-page brochures) and also interactive and static forms that are too many for me to count! I’m doing all this in InDesign along with other rebranded content such as presentations, conference material etc.
I love doing this kind of thing. As this job will eventually end I had an idea to build a business around using my InDesign skills to offer services to others that may need one-off document development. Another idea was to offer services for others that may be rebranding and need help in converting their existing business collateral to the new brand.
I am very experienced in InDesign with practical experience after a few years ago completing advanced level training with Adobe certified trainers. I also continually do training courses in areas I’m not so familiar with to build my skills even more.
My questions to this forum are:
do you see a market for these offerings?
As a graphic designer would you outsource to someone like myself once you have created the branding or do you prefer to do all this yourself? (my question around this is trying to find if graphic designers are a possible source of clients and I could be a help to you)
Who would you see as a possible client base that needs someone with Indesign skills?
Any thoughts, ideas and discussion you could provide to help identify how I can build a business with Indesign skills would be very much appreciated.
Most graphic designers who work on branding projects are intimately familiar with InDesign as part of their daily routine. It’s not just a production tool to assemble a finished design — it’s typically part of the design process itself. The style or brand guide book isn’t something a designer bangs out — it needs to be designed as nicely as any other piece in the branding projects, which means a lot of attention is paid to fine-tuning things as it’s being laid out in InDesign.
There might very well be designers who approach it very differently from that, but how you would find them, I haven’t a clue. I suspect you might have better luck laying out books, catalog updates, rule books, business/government reports and other similar sorts of publication that don’t typically require a designer be involved with every page.
Thank you very much for your feedback and very helpful.
I agree I’d be better positioned in laying out other documents. It was a idea I had as I’m in the position in my current job to be given the style guide and told to create product brochures, conference material, forms etc based from it so thought there might be a market for it, but as you have pointed out it is a rare thing to be done.
I absolutely appreciate the work and skill that goes into producing the style/brand guide from a graphic designer and hope you didn’t take it that it was something I thought that can be thrown together.
No, not at all. I used the phrase “bangs out,” which wasn’t the best choice of words. Instead, I meant that some of us spend quite a bit of time getting the branding guidelines laid out perfectly, so we’d be reluctant to farm out their production and let someone else make some of those decisions. I suppose if we had a style guide for laying out a branding guide, that would change things, but I’ve never heard of such a thing.