by Carl Bunton 5 years ago 
Even as recently as five years ago, if you mentioned hiring the services of a digital design company many people would assume that you wanted to have a logo made, or even your family pictures digitized.
But the fact is, this has not been true for over a generation. Since internet bandwidths have increased, mobile internet use skyrocketed, and videos and animation online have become a major way we consume media, digital design agencies have had to keep up with the times to stay relevant.
Full-service agencies such as 500 Designs, for instance, may offer an incredibly wide array of design services. This may include but certainly isn’t limited to the following:
Strategy
You might be surprised to find that before you can even create a logo – or do any branding effort for that matter, you have to consider your strategy. Agencies today can help you better define and refine your current strategy or even identify alternative directions for your organization. The strategy can then form the basis of the visuals and other media your company uses moving forward. For instance, if you plan to market your ads in the form of animation videos to your potential customers or niche market, then there are agencies (you can learn more here about them) that can help ideate content and help in marketing them.
UX and UI
Digital design agencies today understand that visuals are just one part of the experience. The entirety of a business has to be professional not just in terms of how they appear on websites and print materials, but also in their online and offline interactions with customers. Depending on the purpose and type of site, web designers may need to conduct UX research. There are different types of analysis that can be employed in order to get a better understanding of users’ needs. By using such techniques, one might be able to know more about the shortcomings of their design and, possibly, use their experience to improve their entire setup of user centered design methods.
This realization has made the best agencies in the world heavily invested in the parts of marketing and advertising that the end consumers don’t necessarily see, and that includes UX and UI. It’s almost a truism that for businesses to succeed, they need to create positive experiences where the bumps in the processes are never noticed, if at all. Going with an experienced agency brings you closer to that ideal.
App Design
“App development” is almost a buzzword in itself, but it takes a lot of experience and cultural understanding to make an app that delivers value to your company. Many digital design agencies now offer app development as part of their suite of services. If you’ve already picked a company to help you with strategy and business development, it may be beneficial to also use them for app development or ensure that whoever else you pick works extremely closely with them so that you resulting app is a seamless, intuitive, and hopefully unnoticeable part of just dealing with your business.
Information architecture
Arranging your site and your data in a way that gives you maximum value while delivering an excellent experience for your customers is both an art and a science. It can be argued that there is no perfect way to arrange any large website, but if you work with a digital design company that understands your strategy, market, and goals, you can come extremely close.
Digital design agencies may collaborate with a web development company or have developers on board their own team who work on website development and optimization based on the strategies that work for your business.
Branding and art direction
Of course, digital design companies today can still create logos and other types of graphic designs for you. People today consume media from an extremely wide variety of sources from print, smartphones, desktops, smart TV’s smartwatches, and even smart fridges.
There is a very real need to optimize the branding and art direction for every medium your brand is expected to appear. Quite often, this depth of design is not always easy to expect from internal design teams who may have to work with many other assets. If you want branding and art direction done to the best standards, a collaboration with an agency is often the best course of action.
Conclusion
Digital design agencies today are expected to go well beyond what they were originally intended to do. As the world becomes smaller, the links between different design disciplines have become shorter, stronger, and starker. Your organization should likely take notice.