Why Hiring a Designer Doesn’t Always Get Creative Work Off Your Plate
You hired someone to make the graphics, build the sales page, design the PDF or update the website. They did the work… but somehow, 20 minutes later you’re back in there changing things yourself.
Maybe you only meant to swap out one photo or tweak a colour, but changing that colour means something else doesn’t work anymore. And while you’re in there, you notice the spacing on another section, and actually… that paragraph could probably use a rewrite too.
What felt like a five-minute change has somehow taken most of the afternoon.
And then it happens again tomorrow.
If you’ve been running your business for a while, there’s a good chance you’ve experienced some version of this. You have people to help with the creative work, perhaps very good people, and yet a surprising amount of it keeps finding its way back to you.
You might start wondering whether you’re just terrible at letting go, impossibly picky, or secretly a micromanagy control freak.
We all have our moments, but often, there’s something else at play.
After years of building a business around your own decisions, you’ve accumulated an enormous amount of creative judgement that other people don’t automatically have access to. And if the support around you is mostly set up to execute on specific directions rather than share some of that judgement, you can hire plenty of help while still carrying a lot of the creative workload yourself.
Before we get further into the post, if you prefer to listen, I’ve covered this topic in more detail on the latest episode of the Connect + Create podcast! Listen below, or add the show to your favorite podcast app to get notified when I release a new episode!
You probably have more creative judgement than you realise.
A lot of the founders I work with don’t come from a design or traditionally creative background, and they may not think of themselves as particularly “creative” at all.
They don’t necessarily know why something isn’t working visually, what the technical term is for the thing they want changed, or how they would go about making it themselves.
They still know when it’s wrong.
After years of running a business, you’ve made thousands of decisions about how that business looks, sounds and feels. You’ve developed opinions about what feels too corporate or too salesy, what works on your website but feels weird on Instagram, and how you want someone to feel when they encounter your business.
But often, the lack of technical vocabulary makes getting creative help harder, because you can see that something isn’t quite right without being able to immediately explain what you’re responding to. A designer might look at a layout and recognise that the hierarchy or spacing is creating the problem; you might be looking at exactly the same thing and know only that this version feels a bit off.
That can be a surprisingly uncomfortable position to be in when you’re trying to give someone direction. You’ve spent years learning what “right” looks like for this particular business, even if you’ve never consciously thought of that knowledge as creative expertise. And now you have to somehow translate a feeling you’ve developed over years into useful instructions for another person.
After enough of those conversations, it’s very easy to start wondering whether you’re the difficult part of the equation.
A lot of the creative rules in your business only exist in your head.
You might have an incredibly detailed brand guide, documented processes, approved examples and beautifully organised folders. Or maybe your brand assets are scattered across Canva, Google Drive and a folder somebody named FINAL FINAL BRAND FILES three years ago.
Either way, there are probably things you know about your business that aren’t written down anywhere.
You might know that a particular colour is technically part of the brand, but you wouldn’t use it there. There may be a perfectly good photo of you sitting in the approved folder that, for reasons you cannot entirely articulate, you would really prefer nobody ever use again. Something can follow every rule in the brand guide and still feel far too polished for the way you actually show up on social media.
And it goes well beyond visual preferences. You remember the previous versions of the offer, the things you’ve tried before and deliberately moved away from, how your audience tends to respond and all the little decisions that have gradually shaped the business into what it is now.
A lot of that knowledge doesn’t feel like documentable information when it lives in your own head. It just feels like how the business works.
But then you bring someone new into the team… and suddenly all those invisible rules need to become not so invisible.
Why creative work keeps creeping back onto your plate.
This is where getting creative help can start creating a strange kind of extra work that didn’t exist when it was just you. Which is not exactly ideal when the whole point was to reduce the length of your to do list.
When you involve another person, every new task requires you to cram years of accumulated knowledge into a detailed brief, then translate your own instinctive reactions into constructive feedback afterwards.
If you don’t have the vocabulary to explain exactly what you mean, you might record a 17-minute Loom, or spend hours hunting down a collection of hyper-specific reference images. Some people find themselves prescribing every last detail of every single design, because that seems like the easiest way to communicate what they can already see in their head.
If you go through that process enough times, opening Canva yourself starts to look pretty appealing.
You move one thing on a graphic, and then realise another thing needs moving too. You rewrite the paragraph on the sales page while you’re reviewing it, but now the spacing is messed up, and you can’t decide whether to try and fix it yourself or take it back to your designer and admit you messed it up.
And every single time, you think it’ll take five minutes… and now it’s somehow been three hours.
When you’re putting hours of time into providing directions for a project, and then hours more trying to articulate feedback, before ultimately ending up spending even more time tweaking and fixing and changing things yourself, it can start to feel like hiring creative help simply doesn’t work for you.
The kind of creative support you hire matters.
There are plenty of situations where straightforward execution is exactly what you need. You already know what needs to happen, the decisions have been made, and you want a skilled person to take those instructions and turn them into something good.
The difficulty comes when you expect that same working relationship to eventually remove a meaningful amount of the creative thinking from your plate.
A lot of established online businesses need someone who can get closer to the wider context: what you’re trying to achieve, how the offer works, what the audience already knows, what else is happening around this project and how one decision might affect something elsewhere.
That requires a creative who actually wants to work that way.
There are very talented specialists who are happiest focusing closely on their particular area of expertise. Give them a clear brief and they’ll execute it beautifully.
But there are others who naturally start asking questions about everything surrounding the task, because understanding the bigger picture helps them decide what the work itself needs to do.
The difference between these two approaches becomes incredibly important if you’re hoping to eventually say, “Here’s what we’re trying to do, can you figure out the best way to make this work?”
And this is something worth thinking about before you hire help. Many founders think they only need another pair of hands – because that sounds like the obvious solution to having too much work – only to discover all of the extra decision-making and context gathering later.
Shared context is what makes creative support more useful over time.
Don’t get me wrong — your designer will probably not love you very much if every request is two vague sentences. You cannot hand somebody “make this better pls x” and expect them to psychically download the contents of your brain.
You still need to give them what they need to do the work well: the copy, brand assets, relevant links, useful references and enough direction to understand what you’re actually trying to achieve. If they’re spending half their time hunting through Google Drive and guessing which version of the copy is current, you can’t really be surprised when the result isn’t what you had in mind.
But there’s a limit to how much of a living, evolving business you can package up in a brief. The rest gets built through working together.
As you move through projects, they start to see how you approach a launch. They remember the feedback from the last website update and learn which photos of yourself you actually like, rather than assuming everything in the approved folder is safe territory. More importantly, they start recognising the patterns underneath that feedback and applying what they’ve learned elsewhere without waiting for you to explain it again.
That’s what eventually gets you closer to being able to say, “Can you take a look at this? Something isn’t quite working,” and trust them to investigate the problem, make some decisions and come back with something useful.
Getting the creative work off your plate.
If creative work keeps finding its way back to you even though you’ve hired good people to help with it, there may be more sitting on your plate than the actual production of the work.
There’s the judgement behind it, the history, the tiny decisions, the feedback, the problem-solving and the awareness of how one change affects everything around it.
The more of that you eventually want someone else to take on, the more selective you need to be about the kind of creative relationship you’re building.
This is a huge part of what went into developing Creative Partnership as the way I work with clients now. We work together across the business over a longer period of time, which gives me the opportunity to learn the context behind the work, carry what I’ve learned from one project into the next and take on more of the creative thinking and problem-solving as that trust develops.
If that sounds much closer to the kind of creative help you’ve been trying to find, you can learn more about Creative Partnership here.
And if you’ve experienced the very specific frustration of hiring someone who was genuinely good at what they did and somehow still ending up back in Canva yourself, feel free to DM me on Instagram. I’m always interested in hearing where that process started to fall apart.
See you in the next one!
Emily Banks
