Aidan Casey, CTO, DesignWizard.
Coming up with visual content for social media and other marketing channels can be an uphill battle if you don’t have the technical or design chops. However a new Cork-based startup is making it easier for people to create their own designs for both web and print.
DesignWizard aims to make it simple for small business owners and social media marketers to create eye-catching designs for everything from social updates to flyers and business cards.
“DesignWizard lets anybody create a design for web or print without the need for technical expertise,” said Aidan Casey, the company’s chief technology officer, when I spoke to him at Dublin Tech Summit. “There are tens of thousands of templates which cover most of the scenarios a small business would need.”
One of DesignWizard’s strengths, compared to similar tools available online, is the number of templates available, all sized for specific platforms. It currently offers templates in 20 different sizes, including updates and cover images for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Tumblr, along with print templates from business cards to large posters.
Users can also make their own designs from scratch, using the template size for the exact print or web visual they’re creating.
The company has teamed up with stock image giant Wavebreak Media for some of its visuals, and it also creates original images for use on its platform. It offers a million images, with more planned in the future, and users can also upload their own images and logos for use in their designs.
“We believe everybody is creative and we’ve removed the technological hurdles that stop people from making their own designs,” said Casey. “What differentiates us from other tools is that we own the creative process from end to end. We shoot everything specifically for the design templates.
“Our art directors research the trends and feed ideas to photographers. We can go from creative idea to template in under three days, and because all our content is shot in high definition, every template can be printed up to 300dpi, billboard-size print quality.”
The company operates on a freemium model with a premium option for $9.99 a month, which includes additional storage and use of up to 60 premium designs per month. A third-tier membership for agencies and groups is also in the works.
DesignWizard was founded in 2015 and its platform went live in November. Just three months later, the company is already growing. It employs 20 people in Ballincollig and just announced plans to immediately expand its team by 10, taking on additional software engineers, multimedia designers, marketers and support staff.
The team at DesignWizard.
“We use Lean and Agile principles to make DesignWizard, so we’re constantly asking our clients for feedback and clients are determining our roadmap,” Casey said. “I think that’s the only way to make a business online. Your listen to your clients and you make exactly what they want.
“We publish new templates every week, and we release new versions of the software every two or three days. We have a small team but we can move very, very quickly. We have the automation in place to keep adding incremental changes to the product.
“At Design Wizard, our people are our magic ingredient,” he added. “Creativity and fun is at the heart of everything we do. We take our work seriously but not ourselves.”
