Offshore design firms?

January 4, 2007 8:59 AM

Does anyone have experience with an offshore design/illustration house?

My company needs a bulk amount of small-but-fairly-realistic illustrations (think the kind of stuff one might see on a children's book cover) turned out, and I think this might be a good job for an offshore vendor...but i'm also just generally curious about working with such firms in the future.

...problem is, i'm not sure how to go about searching for a reputable offshore design or illustration firm (google seems to be turning up...lots of unhelpful results). Do such firms exist? Has anyone had a good experience with a particular firm?

Company specifics can be sent my way via email (in my profile) if you'd like...thanks!

posted by tpl1212 to work & money (7 comments total)

Is this work that is going to be consumed in the US? if so, perhaps you guys should cough up the dough for a local illustrator (there are alot of reasonable ones). how about:

www.coroflot.com ?
posted by specialk420 at 9:15 AM on January 4, 2007

talk to kinkos
posted by emptyinside at 9:36 AM on January 4, 2007

I agree with the Special K.

This kinda sucks. Why do you want to send it offshore? Because you want your illustrations on the cheap? Because you dislike the American work ethic? Because nobody in the states can draw?

Would you be interested in American illustrators if they were affordable?
posted by ImJustRick at 9:38 AM on January 4, 2007

Sigh.

The reason I am looking offshore is simply because our project was hit with a major scope change and we need a lot of illustrations churned out in a fairly short period of time. I'm inquiring about design houses (theoretically, it does not need to be offshore) that can handle/manage large(r) amounts of art specs.

We are currently working with local (American) illustrators (7, to be precise), but the load is heavy on them and I was merely inquiring about people's experiences with such firms (if they exist).
posted by tpl1212 at 9:52 AM on January 4, 2007

Ask the 7 local illustrators you already use for recommendations. They probably know good people in their industry who need the work.
posted by sandra_s at 10:55 AM on January 4, 2007

http://goopymart.com/
posted by luriete at 11:11 AM on January 4, 2007

I work at Kinko's -- they relatively recently outsourced all of their design to an Indian(?) outfit.

My experience thus far:

They're great for OCR type things -- typing up résumés and business cards, posters, fliers, and other simple design bits.

We very rarely ask them to design logos or create custom illustrations, though.

Kinko's actually has a book of ~500,000 different clip-arts that we tend to ask them to use or modify, rather than creating custom illustrations.

Maybe Kinko's is just not getting the best that they have to offer, but I don't think I'd trust them to create illustrations or logos.

The quality and flexibility that we were able to get from our old In-House designers was just so much greater.

When customers come in with really complex projects I advise them to check locally rather than using Kinko's because the quality from the offshore folks tends to be inferior.

This is just _one_ company, though -- perhaps only one aspect of one company. (Maybe they train their designers by having them crank out thousands of resumes for Kinko's.)

Have you tried elance.com? It allows you to post a project, then individuals or firms can bid on the project. If you broke your large project into smaller pieces, you might have something.

I haven't used it myself, but some of my friends are freelance graphic designers and have picked up work from that site. I understand that the offshore places frequently bid on these jobs, which is a problem because they can often do the work much more quickly and cheaply than domestic designers can -- my friends were complaining bitterly about this. Perhaps this might also be an option to look into.
posted by ZeroDivides at 5:54 PM on January 4, 2007