How to choose a design agency

We don’t want to walk you through a generic checklist for picking a design agency. Run a quick Google search, and the AI results will show you just how generic things can get.

There are, of course, the essentials. Experience, testimonials, specialisms, high-impact creative services, and a solid project portfolio.Every agency worth its salt should have these, but on their own, they aren’t enough to help you realise the value of your brand.

The big assumption

Many agency websites are built for clients who are shopping for a service they know they need. They expect you to have a tight brief and know exactly what kind of processes and deliverables to expect. Services pages are created to be the mothership, but there’s a problem here. A significant and growing number of design agency clients say they find it difficult to understand the rationale behind multiple services and what binds them together.

That was one of the findings from the 2025 What Clients Think report by Up to the Light and the Design Business Association. The report also found that 59% of clients struggle to understand what an agency ‘does best’ from their website.

Here’s another concern — 79% of clients say they struggle to dedicate enough attention to long-term brand building as they would like to.

‘79% of clients say they can’t pay attention to long-term brand building as much as they would like to.’

Source: Up to the Light & DBA

Painting the plane while it’s in the air

Brand owners are assuming more responsibilities while their teams are shrinking, and the skills and knowledge gaps are becoming even bigger. As a marketing lead, you’re probably painting the plane while it’s still flying.

• Almost half of all marketers (46.2%) say that they turned to outside help for an element of marketing in 2024

• Over half (53%) of marketers working in B2B have done so

Parking work isn’t an option. Having a unique, authentic, consistent brand identity — from URL to IRL — and staying relevant is what separates you from competitors. You need to bring in outside design help.

The information you find on the agency website, a clear offer, the visual and verbal identity, testimonials and work that is explained and demonstrates strong experience in your market — with strong results, thought leadership content, will give you information to narrow down the list. To find the right fit, look beyond a flashy presentation. Go deeper on how the agency’s approach and perspective can be applied to your brand and think about whether you’ll have chemistry with the people delivering it.

53% of marketers working in B2B rely on external agencies.

Source: Marketing Week

Part 1: The importance of brand strategy

Creative without strategy is just pixels.

Agencies live and die by their ability to align brand strategy and creative. The best agencies are also fanatical planners, helping you think through your approach before bringing it to life in exciting new ways.

They’ll use customer, business, competitor and market research to find your strongest position and make a plan to move there. They’ll unearth opportunities no-one else has seen and find the dead ends.

Strategy defines what your brand stands for. These are the blueprints that inform everything from your logo and messaging to how your brand behaves, engages and wins day-to-day. Well-crafted strategies drive more than just visuals — they help you build those emotional connections that transform a company into a brand that’s loved and remembered.

Five questions to think about

1. From your side, who needs to be around the table?
   Be clear with your team (and your prospective agency) about who will be involved in the process from your side. We recommend keeping internal project teams somewhere between 2 and 7 people. Consider building a project steering group to balance the demands and share responsibilities. It will prevent bottlenecks and build camaraderie amongst your colleagues.
2. What’s the time commitment?
   Ask your chosen design agency to clearly outline how long each project phase will take, when to expect presentations how much of your time they will require.
3. Does your agency have a clear research process?
   Ask your agency about their research methodologies. They should be using a mixture of sources to get a proper handle on your business and your industry. Be open to letting them speak with your staff, clients, partners, suppliers and customers to give them the best possible chance of building an objective view of your brand.
4. How will your agency connect brand strategy and business results?
   There can often be a disconnect moving from strategy into creative. Ask your agency how deeply the creative lead will be involved in the strategy phase, and what the handover looks like.
5. How will success be measured?
   Outline your metrics for success, right from the start. Ask your agency how they plan to deliver on those metrics and have an honest conversation about the areas they can positively influence. It’s also essential for both sides to understand what’s expected during the strategy phase.

Part 2. Getting to know their people

Standing together, shoulder to shoulder.

You probably haven’t got the bandwidth to take a step back, think strategically, breathe life into projects and then drive them forward. Projects can take forever because of a lack of leadership on both client and agency side. Things can quickly get messy.

This is why it’s so important to get to know the people behind your agency. You’ll be standing with them, shoulder to shoulder, throughout the process. You’ll bond with them as you create something transformational for your business and your colleagues.

We make it happen. We’ll find what makes you and your business tick, then work with you shoulder to shoulder until your brand is where it needs to be. We also like to believe we’re good fun to work with. We’ll make a real point of understanding your business and work with you to build a brand you can be proud of.

Five questions to think about

1. Do you have chemistry?
   You need to be able to have open and honest conversations with the people you’re working with. Brand building is serious work, but the process should be fun, and that is always easier if you have chemistry with your agency. Sometimes it just isn’t a good fit, and that’s fine.
2. Have they been there and done it themselves?
   Do they have the personal experience to run a project of your scale and ambition? Ask them about their careers, where they’ve worked previously and what their favourite project has been. Agencies are full of people with brilliant stories. If they’ve got the credentials, they’ll be happy to talk you through it all.
3. Do they talk in a language you can understand?
   Our industry can be confusing. Brand building isn’t an exact science, and each agency goes about things differently. Ask them about their processes, and if you’re getting lost, ask them to explain in simpler terms.
4. Are their observations rooted in insight?
   This relates to an earlier point about linking brand strategy with creative direction. Does research support their creative recommendations, or is it style over substance?
5. Is their approach creatively exciting?
   Working with a design agency can be one of the most enjoyable things you do for your brand. You should leave meetings feeling inspired and optimistic about the future of your brand. If you don’t feel this way, we’d suggest looking for an alternative.

Part 3. Clarity

What’s the team line-up?

Seek clarity on who’ll be working on the project to completion, how the agency handles project management and who’s responsible if deadlines start to drift.

Can you trust in their ability to bring things back on schedule and within budget? Since creatives run our studio, you’ll deal directly with the people producing your work. This means we can respond to opportunities quickly, getting the right people in the room to overcome your challenges and move your brand forward.

Our small team of award-winning senior creatives have decades of hard-won, ‘big brand’ experience. We made our names working internationally, advising clients like Adidas, BBC, Google, Sonos and UNICEF.

Five questions to think about

1. Do they understand the challenges you face?
   Ask your agency to play back their understanding of your brief. Ask them if they have solved similar challenges in the past and if they would be comfortable talking you through the journey from start to finish.
2. Can they see the bigger picture?
   Ask them where they think any creative work will take your brand. It’s impossible to say for sure, but a good agency will have a good idea of where your brand stands within your industry and where it can be credibly repositioned.
3. Who’s responsible for each phase of work?
   Ask for a breakdown of who will be delivering on each phase of work. This might feel pedantic, but it will help you understand who you’ll be dealing with at each phase. It will also help you understand the difference in skillsets and allow you to build deeper connections with your agency.
4. How can we collectively meet deadlines?
   Ask your chosen agency how you can help ensure feedback is provided and deadlines are met. This might mean scheduling time to review work or running live feedback sessions. Good design work is a collaboration with responsibilities on both sides of the table.
5. What’s the sign-off process?
   Get to know the sign-off process and what’s involved. This might include a formal review, or it could be as simple as a quick email to approve the work. Either way, it’s essential to set clear expectations from the outset.

Part 4. Communication

Leaving egos at the door.

Does the agency have an open door and an easy way of communicating? Are you clear on your main point of contact? Your time is valuable.

You won’t want to know every twist and turn but you need clarity on how budget and project updates will be shared for review and feedback. And no question is stupid.

We put value on transparency and a no-ego approach to feedback. Both client and agency ultimately want the same thing — a project that leaves both parties satisfied, delivered on time and on budget.

Five questions to think about

1. Are the project deliverables easy to follow?
   Many agencies overcomplicate project delivery. Ask your design agency what deliverables to expect at each phase, rough dates and who will be responsible for providing them.
2. How should feedback be shared or challenged?
   As you may have noticed, boundary-setting is important to us. It prevents misunderstandings and keeps everyone informed. Ask your agency how they want to receive feedback, and aim to stick to it. Some agencies might be comfortable with a chain of 40 WhatsApp messages. Others, like us, prefer to keep everything concise and easy to follow.
3. When and how should you check in on progress?
   Regular check-ins can be helpful, but not every project requires them. A clearly defined project schedule will often include regular check-ins built into the project calendar. Even if it has been a quiet week, it can be helpful to have a 15-minute check-in to ensure nothing has been overlooked.
4. How will you navigate changes in personnel?
   Designers are nomadic by nature. This can make it hard to build long-term relationships with an agency if you expect the staff to move on after 6 or 12 months. Luckily, our team each have 15+ years of experience and are settled in our roles. Ask your agency about their staff turnover, how long their proposed project team have worked with the agency and how they will mitigate any personnel changes.
5. How flexible are they?
   Flexibility is absolutely critical in our industry. As mentioned earlier, brand building is not an exact science and your business will shift and evolve over time. Ask your agency how they will respond to challenges as they come up, how flexible they can be with moving deadlines and how they would resource any additional requests.

Part 5. Diversity and inclusion

Bigger impact through diversity.

Will the team bring the diverse experiences, abilities, and viewpoints it takes to build brands that are inclusive and meaningful?

More diverse design teams create work that makes a bigger impact. Almost 7 in 10 clients say that diversity is important when choosing and working with design consultancies, according to the recent What Clients Think report.

Three questions to think about

1. Does the team bring a diversity of ideas and people?
   When choosing a design agency, ask whether their project team has a mix of experience and backgrounds.
2. Will they help us take an honest snapshot of your brand?
   Asking the right questions can make all the difference. Diverse teams have diverse perspectives, which leads to unique research and insight.
3. Will they help us convert commitment into action?
   Ask your agency how they plan to activate any ESG, culture or sustainability initiatives.

Part 6. Noise and signal

An ear to the ground.

Time pressures mean you’ve barely got time for the day job and business as usual. You’d need another whole lifetime to attend all the webinars you’re invited to, attend events and listen to podcasts.

Then there’s the scrolling. You constantly see stories in your feeds and inboxes about trends, market development and best practice. A good agency partner picks up the signal from the noise for you.

Big brand experience

As we discussed in a recent guide, the principles of creating a standout brand that wins hearts and minds and makes customers want to stay apply to all brands, no matter the size. You may lack the size and scale of businesses with heritage, awareness and deeper pockets that dominate your category. But there are lessons on disruptive brand building from the big brands that can be applied to your business.

Industry benchmarking

You can learn as much from other brands’ failures as from their successes. We use industry benchmarking to identify who’s innovating, how they are making gains and where they are connecting with their audiences. We also scout ahead to identify common traps or pitfalls and put plans in place to avoid them.

Your eyes and ears

What developments do you need to know about, and what can you forget about?

Five questions to think about

1. Will the agency team bring a fresh perspective?
2. How do we plan 12 to 18 months out?
3. How do we set new design standards?
4. How are ideas shared and tested?
5. How is risk mitigated?

Part 7. Service offering

Patchwork design creates patchwork experiences.

Why consider a full service agency? If you build your brand through a patchwork of design agencies then the risk is your brand and client experience becomes patchwork.

Customers don’t just want a shiny website or logo. They want a meaningful experience that makes their lives better. They want brand consistency whether they’re on your website completing an order or standing in your store. And that’s why we’re full-service.

We’ve gone full circle here. Strategy and creative need to align, We work with you on every element of brand development — from design to videos to photography and everything in between.

We have a broad network of world-class creative talent who can (and do) help us deliver specific parts of a project. We put together an enviable team of specialists to deliver the project to completion, with full accountability. You’ll find that a small agile team will be driven to do good work that solves problems at fair value.

Five questions to think about

1. Can they deliver everything we’re asking of them?
2. Is their network robust enough to support our needs?
3. How are project phases divided?
4. Who has ultimate brand guardianship over the project?
5. How closely does each service align internally?