Graphics design might be one of the most disrespected professions out there. Every man and their dog thinks they’ve got the chops to pull off a great design with a one-hour crash course on Photoshop. We blame the plucky parents who stick every fingerpainting up on the fridge, regardless of the quality.

When it comes to representing your service and brand, you don’t want to cut corners on design. The internet is much less forgiving than your dear, sweet mother. Below we’ve rounded up all the different types of design you’re going to need launching a product or service, the skills required for each, and the tools they’ll likely use to get the job done.

Your logo and branding are a shorthand for your company's identity. A logo is often the first impression you get to make with would-be customers so it needs to be eye-catching, memorable and where possible, it should communicate what your company provides and your core values.

Besides word of mouth, your logo and branding will be the first thing a potential customer or user associates with your company, so make it count.

Logo and branding design isn’t a once and done practice. It’s widely accepted that a company should rebrand (or at the very least, revisit) every five years or so. Think about the Airbnb logo and branding. We guarantee that when you picture it, you’re thinking of the current “Bélo” marque. But that logo has only existed since 2014. Before that, Airbnb sported a comparatively simple blue bubble font as its logo. Here’s a fascinating write-up on Airbnb’s 2014 logo update. Use it as inspiration for creating your own.

Your logo and branding form a consistent identity that sticks in the minds of potential customers. This serves as the public face of your company. Studies have found it takes 50 milliseconds for people to form a visual impression. It’s also an early sign of professionalism and quality. Bad logo design can make your entire company look untrustworthy and amateur.

There’s also the dreaded pitfall of accidentally creating a logo that resembles something it’s not meant to. In some cases, it’s something lude. In other cases, like the recent Slack logo update, it can accidentally resemble a swastika. Another rule of thumb: if you’re logo can be mistook for a) something sexual or b) a swastika, consider firing your designer.

But, seriously folks, why do you need a great logo design? Consider this: there are well over 2 million apps on iOS and Android. Every single day, more and more are being added. If you want your brand to make an impact, your logo needs to be able to catch the eye of anyone scrolling through the store (or their own app drawer) at the speed of light.

The same can be said for other online services and small businesses. Digital marketing experts in the U.S. believe individuals are exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day. What are you doing to make your brand stand out in the crowd?

A good logo should clearly communicate what your company does. It should be simple and readable, and above all it should be visually appealing.

The most iconic company logo designs of all time are, on a surface level, quite basic and use simple colour palettes: Nike’s “swoosh” conveys speed and movement, Coca-Cola’s swirly, ribbon-like typography is so iconic it doesn’t use or need any iconography, the Apple logo that adorns the devices you use every day is most recognisable not because of the simple apple shape but the “bite” out if its right side and McDonald’s “golden arches” is just a curvy, yellow “M” (that also happen to look somewhat like french fries). The Olympics, National Geographic and Target logos all share one design principle: Anyone with a pen and paper can recreate these logos. As a general rule of thumb, if you’re logo can’t be sketched by a five-year old, it’s not simple enough to be memorable.

Ideally, your logo isn’t just something that lives at the top of your website, or on the icon for your app. It’s something your employees would wear proudly in public. If you’re onto something especially memorable and stylish (and if your brand is aspirational enough), it's even something your users would happily sport on a hoodie out in public. Don’t get us wrong, inspiring your users to wear your financial services brand on a baseball cap is a bit of a stretch. But if your company is lifestyle-focused (i.e. a gym), there are plenty of reasons why a customer or member would one to wear your brand loud and proud. Now get out there and make them a logo worth wearing.

There are plenty of graphics designers who will whip you up company branding and logo but the best offer a number of options and the justification behind their choices. The best freelance graphics designers will want to familiarise themselves with your brand before accepting the job. They’ll want to know your company’s purpose, who your customers are and exactly what kind of first impression you want to make.

You’re going to need a graphics designer with experience with Adobe Illustrator. Files created in Adobe Illustrator are exported as “vectors”, files that can be resized without losing any quality. So whether you’re looking to print your logo on a billboard, embed it on your site, or print it on a business card, you can do so without impacting the design’s resolution.

If you’re only operating one service within your company, your corporate visual design is going to look a lot like your branding and logo. However, if you provide a number of products and services, it could look totally unique. Think of it like this: if your branding and logo are what you’re slapping on mugs, t-shirts and baseball caps, your corporate design tends to be what will appear on letterheads and other official company documents.

Again, this might not differ from your general logo and branding, depending on the type of company you’re running. There aren’t designers who specialise in “corporate design” necessarily, as it itself isn’t a breakaway profession. Keep that in mind when searching for a graphic designer. If someone can provide branding and logo design, it’s likely they can sort out part of your corporate design too. With that said, there can be more moving parts in “corporate design” than a graphic designer can handle alone.

If your company is big enough to require interactive employee training guides, or if you offer members services, like transferring money, your corporate image should run a thread through each and every interaction, unifying the experience for users and employees alike.

For example, you might have a notification jingle associated with your brand. It’s important that this jingle doesn’t grind the listener’s gears after the 10,000th loop but it’s just as important that it’s memorable and easily associated with your brand and product.

Take the Nintendo Switch, for example. When it released in 2017, the now infamous “click” sound effect played in all promotional material has become synonymous with the console itself and maybe even more iconic than the console’s logo. The sound effect doesn’t just play in advertisements, it also plays across the console’s operating system. It encapsulates the hybrid device’s flexibility and ease of use. It’s a digital recreation of the physical “click” noise the Switch makes when a user disconnects/connects the controllers from the console, switching between mobile and console gaming (the console’s biggest selling point).

Another example of corporate design would be the iPhone’s default “Marimba” ringtone, or the Mac’s “whoosh” sound effect when an email is sent. These appear in advertisements and movies totally unrelated to the the iPhone or iMac but viewers and listeners still associate them immediately with the Apple brand. It’s free advertising. There’s a 2013 Forbes article that describes the Marimba ringtone as a “badge of honour” for early iPhone adopters. It allowed people who paid the hefty price for an iPhone to publicly broadcast their costly piece of tech. Despite having the option to switch, most iPhone users keep the default Marimba ringtone because of the status is carries. Imagine creating something like that for your own brand.

Get yourself somebody who can do it all. Depending on the size of your company, you probably want to start small with simple branding and logo design. But as you begin to grow and paid advertising becomes an option, you might want to consider hiring an agency or a crack team of brand specialists to help build and unify your corporate design across every medium. That means having the same sentiment resonate across outdoor advertising, video advertisements, social posts and more.

Realistically, brand and logo design only make up the static, visual representation of your company. If you want to go that one step further, you’re going to need specialists across a number of fields, including but not limited to video production, marketing, sound design and a damn good copywriter.

There are a whole suite of products your creative team will need to be familiar with. For audio design, Adobe Audition is a good starting point and for video, Premiere is the way to go. Different creatives will have their program of choice but for beginners it’s a good idea to start with a software suite with a shared language across products.

So you’ve got your logo, branding and corporate design down pat, now it's time to consider getting your company and/or service live on the internet. If your service is web-based, this step would typically come before spending any significant amount of money on branding and corporate design.

However, if you’re a trade professional or run a small physical shopfront, it’s likely you’ve sorted your branding and logo before your website. Regardless, whatever part of your business journey you’re on, you’re going to need some top-shelf web design eventually.

While logo and branding can be done by any old designer with a bit of artistic flair (and basic knowledge of Adobe’s design products), Web Design is a multifaceted profession, one with a larger pool of skills required.

Whether you’re running a small business like a café or a larger web service, you’re going to need a website at some part of your journey. For the latter, your journey obviously begins with web design. If you’re the former, it comes a little later down the line once your business is set up and you’ve got something to show off.

Small businesses can appear in Google Maps search results without a dedicated website, but providing potential customers with as much information as possible, on a modern, user-friendly website never hurts. It can also help your business rank higher in Google Maps’ search results (handy if you’re just one of twenty hairdressers in your suburb).

Depending on the type of website you will be running, you might be able to get away with using a content management system (CMS) like Wordpress or Squarespace. There are plenty of web designers out there with experience with these platforms.

Think about the last time you searched for the best restaurants in your area. User reviews are a great indicator of quality, but if a restaurant or cafe has a responsive website with photos and menus available to the public, it’s easier to get an idea of what you’re getting yourself in for.

There are many best practices for small businesses to follow to help their store stand out on Google Maps. Gone are the days when a simple website with all the relevant location and contact information on a single landing page would get you by. There are technical SEO experts out there who can help you structure your website to help it rank in Google but to get you started, here’s a helpful guide from Semrush on creating seperate, SEO-optimised pages to help your local business rank in Google Maps. This will all be covered by your technical SEO specialist.

Most web designers have a degree of experience with technical SEO, so you may not need to employ the help of a seperate specialist. Typically, a web design team will be comprised of a web designer and a web developer.

Eventually, you’re going to need to recruit the help of a graphic designer (likely the same you’ve already hired to create your logo and branding design), a technical SEO writer, a general copywriter and a front-end developer who specialises in user experience (UX) design. Your UX designer will work with your graphic designer on your website’s general theme and aesthetic, but they will also take on the user testing, site architecture and interaction design of your website/service.

If your website or service is selling a physical product, whether that’s handcrafted soaps or organic hair care products, you will need an experience packaging designer to make sure your product makes a great first impression before you begin shipping. If your logo and branding are your first impression with a potential customer, your packaging design is the first date. It’s (part) of the reason your first customer decides to take this relationship to the next level and order that second shipment.

Of course, the logo and branding that you’ve already sourced from an experienced graphic designer will also adorn the physical product you sell, but a packaging designer will take into consideration the shape and dimensions of your product and packaging as well as the materials used (especially for perishable food products).

Packaging designers are the unsung heroes of the ecommerce world. Every time a teenager receives an iPhone for Christmas and shreds the cardboard box without a second thought, a packaging designer sheds a single tear. If you take the time to appreciate the design of the iPhone box, you will notice its ingenuity. Apple have engineered the box of the iPhone to make the unboxing process feel significant, momentous. The act of peeling the first security sticker off and slowly sliding the contents of the package out has been specifically engineered to provide a sensory experience that makes the hardware inside feel elegant and regal.

You’ll also notice that many cheaper, everyday products like soaps and candles will be wrapped in paper and sealed with string. These give them a more handmade, crafty feel (even if they are mass-produced by a huge corporation).

More practically, you need a packaging designer to make sure your product arrives to your customer in one piece. If your product is particularly fragile, your packaging designer will take into consideration the negative space needed to fill with packaging foam or shock mount packaging materials. If your product is a perishable, your packaging designer will take will make the call on whether vacuum-sealed or preservation packaging (e.g. aluminum-lined) are required and economically viable.

Your packaging designer will need to work with closely with your logo and branding designer to create packaging that is on-brand, visually appealing but also practical and affordable.

While Adobe offers a perfectly capable 3D design tool with Adobe Dimension, there is a whole suite of services more popular amongst packaging designers. Esko in one such service. Esko’s most popular product is ArtiosCAD, a popular structural design software specifically created for packaging design with dedicated features for product development, virtual prototyping and manufacturing. ArtiosCAD also provides the tools necessary for point-of-purchase (POP), point-of-sale (POS) and free-standing-unit (FSDU) design if you’re aspiring to have your product in supermarkets and shopping centres.

Esko also provides the popular Studio software. Studio is a mix of plug-ins and add-ons for use in Adobe Illustrator. As we mentioned earlier, it’s never a bad idea to keep all of your design projects within one ecosystem but even so, Studio is a supremely popular product in its own right. Big brands like Nike and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals use and advocate Esko’s Studio software.

With that said, any designer who specialises in 3D design will already have their weapon of choice, so it's best to focus on their portfolio and past work rather than the tools they use.