Launched in January 2015, Design Pickle is a cloud-based graphic design company that specializes in providing personalized graphic design support for small to medium-sized design jobs.
Design Pickle’s physical headquarters is in Scottsdale, Arizona but, as they are an entirely virtual service, they use the cloud for all of their work. The company’s goal is to create a totally new way for graphic design to be delivered to people who need it.
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About Design Pickle
The design service is sold on a subscription basis, the same model popularized by WP Curve (for WordPress support) and Copywriter Today (for content writing).
Design Pickle seeks to make connections with anyone with a need for fast, easy, and affordable graphic design. With same-day turnaround on most projects, Design Pickle offers quick solutions to basic graphic design jobs, primarily for a small business client base without in-house design staff.
Design Pickle Founder Interview
Services
Design Pickle will provide designs for small projects (business cards, flyers, presentations, brochures, etc.) to people who may not be savvy when it comes to design software, or who don’t have the time or man-hours to spend on those projects.
Founder Russ Perry stresses the fact that Design Pickle is geared toward solutions for small- to medium-sized projects in small business or solo entrepreneur models, and not mass producing or supporting the main structure of a company.
Design Pickle also does not generate copy, so any text you want on your materials you will have to write yourself.
Design Pickle Intro Video
How it Works
Communicating through email, their designers ask a series of questions about your project to better narrow down what it is you are specifically asking for. They then take whatever basic images/copy/graphics you might have (using cloud-sharing sites like Dropbox for larger files), and then work up a design for you.
Turnaround is one business day (7am-7pm), and Design Pickle prides themselves on delivering a personalized one-on-one customer experience with a dedicated support team. Any vague or unclear requests don’t get assigned, so it’s best to be as clear and concise as possible from the beginning.
If you think the design is not exactly what you want, Design Pickle will continue to work with you to revise the product until you are happy. (There’s also a 30-day money back guarantee.)
Plans and Pricing
$399 per month gets you unlimited graphic design requests, one business day turnaround, and unlimited revisions.
There are no contracts and you can cancel at any time.
Virtual Assistant Assistant Exclusive: Use promo code VA30 for 30% off your first month!
Design Pickle considers an ideal request to entail about 30 minutes of design work.
If, after talking to your team, your project is too big to be considered a single design task, Design Pickle will help you break it down into smaller, more manageable tasks, each of which would then be considered a separate project.
Design Pickle Alternatives
For one-off design tasks, you have several alternatives. I actually do a lot of my own design work (which to be fair isn’t amazing) in PicMonkey, PowerPoint, or order graphics gigs on Fiverr.
Penji is a popular Design Pickle alternative for graphic design. Their top-rated designers, quick turnaround, and affordable subscription make them an easy choice for thousands of agencies, marketers, and even Fortune 500 companies.
The nearest alternative is UnicornGo, which operates on a similar model.
On the higher end, you have the crowdsourcing design marketplace 99Designs and the freelance megastore of Upwork.
In the case of 99designs, you submit your design brief following their detailed questionnaire, and designers from all around the world submit their ideas and you pick the winner. It’s a cool system because you can get multiple inputs but costs $299 at a minimum (vs. $399 per month with Design Pickle for unlimited designs).
And with Upwork, you’ll submit your project and collect bids back, and have to select your winner. For one-off design work it can be very time-consuming, and you only have the input of one designer at the end of the day.
Your Turn
Have you worked with Design Pickle? If so, please be sure to leave a brief review of your experience below to help others with their decision.
Two stars for value only because you can dump work on them every day. The quality of the work can be pretty awful. Communication is spotty to downright dreadful. Find a young, local designer (even a design student), and support them.
Horrible service! Basic graphics take more than two day and becuase they use overseas designers you have to do double time explaining what you need. Also they are very limited in what they can do. All in all if you need simple things like social graphics, Fiverr will still save you time and money.
Overall happy with the service. Plan to work through several designs before really getting into the groove with your designer. Experience giving feedback on creative work is also a huge plus. You really do get out what you put in: if you can keep them busy and keep up with responses and the queue, it’s a great value. Overall I’m happy!
I’ve been using Design Pickle for about 6 months now and I’m loving the service. I use them to create almost daily images for my blog and social media accounts. They have quick turnaround time, and they deliver consistently high quality images.
I was a little leery of the price at first, but given what I’d pay a freelancer for the same amount of work, this is great.