Imagine this: you have a business idea that you know can be really successful, a solution that has the potential to change lives, or at least make moments easy. However, when putting it into execution, it doesn’t translate the trust, usability, functionality, or even aesthetics.
Now you realise that you need help with a bunch of things, maybe branding, marketing, UI/UX design, graphics, copywriting, digital product development, and other aspects. You go out to find an agency that could help you, but you see so many types that you get confused.
This blog will highlight the types of agencies there are in the market and which one you should approach. Let’s dive in.
Breakdown of the Major Types of Design Agencies
There are different types of design agencies. Here we are mentioning some of them.
1. Branding Agencies
Branding agencies understand a brand’s objectives, ethos, identity, and tone of voice. Based on this knowledge, they develop a brand strategy that defines the guidelines, messaging, and services.
Services provided by the branding agency:
- Brand vision: A brand agency defines its positioning so that the values and core personality remain consistent and reach its target audience. They create, launch and revamp a brand’s vision.
- Research and analysis: Research experts perform consumer research and analyse competitors’ actions. They define the value proposition and sometimes name the brand.
- Construct design: A branding agency guides aspects of design, such as logos, typography, and colour palettes, that remain consistent throughout the brand’s design process. The identity system, brand architecture and portfolio are other aspects of a brand identity the agency handles.
- Brand messaging: Every brand has distinctive messaging that defines the marketing language and key messages used in activities such as digital campaigns.
- Brand guidelines development: Guidelines help ensure the brand doesn’t stray from predetermined guidelines while running creative ad campaigns that communicate the brand message.
Branding agencies are often confused with other digital agencies, but their main goal is to match the brand’s communication with the overall strategy.
Team composition:
These agencies usually have a diverse team because they handle many segments. User research experts, digital marketing experts, creative writers, and graphic designers.
- Account manager: An intermediate between the stakeholders and the agency who mediates the communication.
- Brand strategist: Researches the market, both competitors and consumers.
- Creative director/Designer: Responsible for creating branding and advertising content while maintaining consistency in all the artworks.
- Copywriter: Writes crisp and selling content for visuals in the campaigns.
- Graphic designer: Creates visuals for the brand’s needs.
- Photographer/videographer: Creates visual content for the brand. However, most brand agencies hire them externally.
2. Creative Agencies
In the industry among stakeholders, the titles branding and creative can be used interchangeably, but they are not so similar. Sure, branding and creative firms both help and promote brands, but there are some differences in the services they offer.
While branding agencies focus solely on branding, creative agencies offer campaign-specific solutions. Storytelling, designing with emotion, and creating narratives are at the heart of their work atmosphere.
Services provided by the creative agency:
- Generating content: Creating content that advertises your business for a short-term, specific project, like seasonal product launch campaigns.
- Building strategies: Develops brand content for marketing and advertising on social media and other channels. Content includes a logo, promo materials, landing pages, and digital products.
- Multidisciplinary services: A wide range of services, including advertising, consulting, design and digital solutions. A business’s marketing and branding objectives should be kept in mind while forming these creative campaigns in the media, such as print ads, PR, TV ads, and so on.
Team composition:
Typical job roles present within a creative agency’s team include,
- Creative director/Designer: Heads the process of designing campaigns within the brand standards while closely monitoring other creative team members, such as designers and copywriters.
- Account manager: A mediator between the client and the agency.
- Content strategist: Plans, creates, edits and publishes content based on research and business goals.
- Web developer: Creates a website.
Other roles include copywriter, photographer, videographer, marketer, and graphic designer.
3. Digital Agencies
As the name suggests, a digital agency provides various services to help businesses establish and improve their online presence. Digital marketing is the way to go for businesses to succeed in today’s world.
A digital agency is the perfect fit for performance-focused digital-first campaigns. These agencies usually specialise in a particular area of digital marketing and advertising. Clients approach them to reach their target audience through the digital space because everybody is online.
Services provided by the creative agency:
- Website design and development: A website is usually a user’s first impression of a business. The agency helps create a functional, easily navigable website that generates more leads.
- Content creation: Digital space works with images, videos, articles, and so on; hence, content creation covers most of the agency’s activities.
- Search Engine Optimisation: This doesn’t just stop at creating content but also optimises it for search engines so that it gets noticed through organic search.
- Email marketing: Helps in reaching more people through email.
- Social media marketing: Increases traffic on social media through building trust with the audience and showcasing knowledgeable content.
Team composition:
- Digital marketing manager: Creates marketing strategies, implements and manages marketing campaigns.
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- Account manager: This person mediates communication between the client and the agency, delegates tasks among team members, and ensures everyone moves in the right direction.
- SEO Specialist: Analyses the workings of search engines and makes the websites rank higher in search rankings on search engines such as Google.
- Social media specialist: Social media is part of most digital landscapes. A specialist creates and manages social media strategy.
Other roles include copywriter, content manager, photographer, videographer, web developer, and graphic designer.
4. UI/UX Design Agencies
Netflix makes it so easy to watch your favourite film. You just have to tap on the screen 3-4 times, and there it is: the movie is right there in front of you. The credit for this goes straight to the easy user flow of the user interface designed by User Experience (UX) designers.
The aesthetic black and red-themed user interface that you see on the platform is designed by User Interface (UI) designers. This is what UI and UX designers and the agency design all digital products, such as websites, web apps, mobile apps, SaaS products, etc.
Services provided by the UI/UX design agency:
- Product strategy and positioning: Creates a digital product’s vision, roadmap, and messaging based on customer expectations, needs and pain points. Market research is conducted based on business goals, and analysis is done afterwards.
- Brand identity design: Creates visual brand assets that translate the brand’s personality and make it easy for the brand to be recognised across multiple touchpoints.
- UX Research: Researching user needs and pain points and performing a competitive analysis. Customer interviews, surveys and usability further highlight user requirements.
- Interaction design: Designers map how the target audience will engage with the product. Intuitive flows are designed for different use cases.
- Visual designing: Turn initial wireframes into appealing designs aligned with brand style guides. High-fidelity, interactive prototypes are created to give stakeholders a view of how the final product will look so that they can validate the digital product before launching.
- Usability testing: Before the launch, a UI/UX design agency tests prototypes with a discernible target user to gather insights and refine the design.
Team composition:
Usually, a UI/UX design team consists of:
- UX designer: The UX designer ensures that the user is the central focus of the digital product. This is done by conducting user research, understanding the target audience, and creating a prototype for testing.
- UI designer: Design the user interface so that users find the platform aesthetically pleasing and intuitive, allowing them to find any information they desire.
- User researcher: This person researches the target audience and helps form a user persona so that the design finds a user base when it lands in the market.
- Project manager: Intermediary between the client and the team that makes communication possible, and sometimes is also responsible for delegating the task among team members.
5. Web Design Agencies
The name Web design agency is pretty much self-explanatory; they design websites. People usually confuse these with web development companies, whose focus is functionality. On the other hand, web design agencies focus on the look, feel and site navigation.
Web design agencies don’t only make visually appealing websites but also make them functional. They are responsible for layout, design to development, responsiveness across devices, and CMS setup (like WordPress, Webflow). All of this while ensuring the website is aligned with the brand identity.
Services provided by the Web design agency:
- Site architecture: Web designers create the map of the site architecture and user flows that ensure that users can quickly find what they are looking for and take the required action.
- Visual design: They decide on layout, colour scheme, typography, and graphics to make the website look more appealing to the eyes.
- Business recommendations: A few web design agencies go beyond the core design services and suggest ways for a business to increase its conversion rate and user interactions to attract more customers.
Team composition:
- Creative Director/Design Lead: Manages the creative vision and ensures consistency across all projects. Reviews and approves design output while checking up on the work by junior designers.
- UI/UX Designer: Responsible for creating the website’s user interface and user experience. Designs wireframes, sitemaps, and user flows focusing on usability and visual hierarchy.
- Web Developer: There are front-end developers who bring designs to life in browsers by converting UI designs into code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript).
Then, back-end developers handle server-side logic and database integration by building and managing CMS, databases, and user authentication.
- Project Manager/Account Manager: The middle person coordinating between the team and the client. Manages timelines and budgets while ensuring the stakeholders’ expectations are aligned with the team.
Other roles include the copywriter, SEO specialist, quality assurance tester and content strategist.
6. Marketing Agencies
Marketing agencies offer marketing services that go beyond design-related services. They provide complete funnel marketing services that combine a wide range of specialisations, such as branding and graphic design, content, copywriting, search engine optimisation, and more.
Services provided by the Marketing agency:
- Marketing and brand strategies: Every brand needs a different story to conduct successful marketing campaigns. An agency helps create strategies that follow a story and a narrative.
- Content creation: Content that works as a medium to showcase why customers should be interested in the business is needed. Content includes videos, photos, posters, infographics, copies, etc.
- Search Engine Optimisation: After creating content, the process doesn’t stop. The experts need to make the content rank on the search engines so that it finds the right audience.
- Email marketing: Emails are a great way to promote a business, and there are services like email automation that make it easier to perform marketing campaigns through Emails.
- Offline events: Marketing doesn’t stop at screens; offline physical events can be organised to promote the business’s presence and give it a real-life feel.
- Public Relations: Maintaining a positive image of the company to keep it away from any form of scandal.
- Automation services: Software can automate a few routine, repetitive practices in marketing.
- Media buys: Huge media platforms such as TV stations, magazines, websites, blogs, and newspapers can be of paramount importance to advertising.
Note: Usually, a marketing agency offers these services, but since marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses many activities, you should ask the agency you are approaching if they specialise in the domain you need help in.
Team Composition:
- Marketing director: This person creates a general marketing plan and formulates marketing campaigns based on it. The director also measures the ROI of different promotional channels.
- Content Manager: Ideates, plans and manages ad campaigns while keeping brand standards in mind.
- Project Manager: This person works as a facilitator who mediates communication between the stakeholders and the agency so that factors like budgets and timelines are not negotiated.
- Digital marketing manager: Review marketing strategies used on social media and other digital platforms.
- Email specialist: Builds email lists, writes emails, and generates leads through the email channel.
Other vital roles in the marketing agency include creative manager, copywriter, social media manager, web developer, graphic designer, and SEO specialist.
How to Evaluate and Shortlist the Right Agency
With so many agencies in the market, finding the one that fits your business goals and objectives can be challenging. However, here’s a checklist for you to find the right agency.
Frame objectives
Know what you want to achieve when you hire an agency. Before you start looking for help outside, make sure that your internal house is in order. Make a clear brief of what you want to achieve so that potential agencies get the context to provide relevant solutions.
Answer questions like,
- What problems are we solving?
- What does success look like?
- What deliverables do we expect?
- What KPIs are we targeting?
- What is the timeline we are looking at?
- What budget can we afford to spend?
Do Your Research With the Referrals
Before you look for the perfect agency for your needs, you should ask the people around you for referrals that have helped them in the past. No amount of your research will equal the personal experiences of your known people who have hired an agency in the past.
Talk to developers or marketers in your network who have collaborated with agencies. Employees know a great deal about the company they used to work for.
Apart from that, you can cast a wide net and look for agencies on websites such as,
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- Clutch: There are reviews on this platform for businesses that are sorted by service and industry.
- Dribble and Behance: These platforms have portfolios of different businesses that give a sneak peek into a business’s capabilities.
- LinkedIn: A professional platform that allows you to check for team members, thought leadership and company culture of a business you want to work with.
- Google & Medium: Research a brand’s case studies and thought pieces using these platforms.
Last Thoughts
Picking the right agency starts with understanding your business’s goals and objectives, and then determining which agency aligns with those. Each agency serves different purposes depending on the stage you are in building the brand. With the right agency, design doesn’t just become aesthetically pleasing; the business succeeds overall.
Ready to pick your design partner? Contact Yellow Slice to be your UI/UX design strategic partner and let them handle everything from ideation to execution.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Can one agency handle all the needs, such as marketing, design, and branding?
Yes, there are full-service marketing agencies that often offer a broader scope of work that includes branding, creative, and digital solutions all at one stop. If your project is complex and requires help in almost all arenas, be it digital marketing, web design, branding, graphics, etc., we suggest you go for full-service marketing agencies. They can streamline communication and bring consistency in all domains.
2. Which agency should I hire to improve the online visibility of my business and website, too?
A digital agency is your best pick for enhancing online visibility. They focus on SEO, social media, content, and performance-driven campaigns. However, for a website-focused action, a UI/UX or web design agency is a better option because they specialise in the domain.
UI/UX crafts a user-centred user experience and interface design, while web design agencies focus on site layout, aesthetics, and responsiveness.
