Hire a Graphic Designer who keeps your brand consistent

Review portfolios for range and fit

Look for work similar to what you need, whether social graphics, presentations or print. A beautiful portfolio in a different style may not translate to your brand.

Use a paid brief as a test

A short design task using your brand guidelines shows how a designer interprets briefs, applies brand rules and responds to feedback.

Set up a request process

Use a request board with a simple brief template. Clear requests reduce back-and-forth and give everyone visibility of what is in progress.

Agree turnaround and revisions

Define standard turnaround times by request type and the number of revision rounds included. Predictability helps your team plan campaigns.

Invest early in templates

Ask your designer to build templates for recurring formats in the first month. Templates speed up future work and help keep everything on brand.

A sample job summary for a graphic designer

A clear summary might read: we are looking for a graphic designer to create social content, ad creative, presentations and sales collateral that follow our brand guidelines. You will work from a request board with clear briefs, build reusable templates in Canva and Figma and manage our brand asset library. This role suits a designer who combines strong visual skills with organisation, speed and openness to feedback.

Red flags when hiring a graphic designer

Be wary of portfolios that are visually impressive but unrelated to the formats you need, or designers who struggle to explain the reasoning behind their choices. Also watch for poor file management, such as unlabelled files or no editable sources, which causes problems later. Ask how they handle feedback they disagree with. Defensive answers can predict friction, while thoughtful answers suggest a productive working relationship.

What a good first week looks like

Your graphic designer gains access to brand assets and the request board, reviews existing materials and identifies inconsistencies. They complete a few quick requests to calibrate your preferences and start organising assets into a shared library. By the end of the week, they should propose a short list of templates that would save the most time, based on the requests your team makes most often.

Designer, agency or design subscription?

Agencies suit major brand projects and complex campaigns. Design subscriptions offer volume but can lack familiarity with your brand. A dedicated designer through Apex combines consistent brand knowledge with agreed turnaround times and management support. If your needs are steady and varied, from social posts to sales decks, a dedicated designer usually delivers the most consistent quality.

Tools and access to prepare for your graphic designer

Share your logo files in all formats, brand colours with exact values, fonts or font licences, photography and any existing templates. Provide access to your Canva team or Figma workspace and set up a shared folder where source files will live under your ownership. Create a simple request board with a brief template so requests arrive in a consistent format from day one.

It also helps to share a few examples of designs you love and a few you dislike, with a sentence about why. These references calibrate taste faster than any written guideline and reduce revision rounds in the first month.

Measuring your graphic designer's contribution

Track turnaround time by request type, the number of revision rounds, volume delivered and how often templates are reused by your team. For marketing creative, connect designs to performance metrics such as ad click rates or engagement where possible. Collect quick feedback from requesters each month. Consistent turnaround, fewer revisions over time and growing template use are clear signs your designer is working well.

Interview questions to ask a graphic designer

1. How do you approach a brief with limited information?
2. Show me a project where you worked within strict brand guidelines.
3. How do you handle conflicting feedback?
4. Which templates would you create first for us?
5. How do you organise and name design files?
6. How do you use AI tools in your design process?
7. How do you prepare files for professional printing?
8. What turnaround can you commit to for social graphics?

A 30, 60 and 90 day plan for your new graphic designer