Breadth vs. Depth: Lessons from Agencies and In-House Design

I recently read a post on Threads in which Stephen Beck wonders why the New York Times needs an external advertising agency when it already has an award-winning agency in-house. You can read the back-and-forth in the thread itself, but I think Nina Alter’s reply sums it up best:

Creatives need to be free to bring new perspectives. Drink other kool-aid. That’s much of the value in agencies.

This all got me thinking about the differences between working in-house and at an agency. As a designer who began my career bouncing from agency to agency before settling in-house, I’ve seen both sides of this debate firsthand. Many of my designer friends have had similar paths. So, I’ll speak from that perspective. It’s biased and probably a little outdated since I haven’t worked at an agency since 2020, and that was one that I owned.

I think the best path for a young designer is to work for agencies at the beginning of their careers. It’s sort of like casually dating when you first start dating. You quickly experience a bunch of different types of people. You figure out what your preferences are. You make mistakes. You learn a lot about your own strengths and weaknesses. And most importantly, you grow. This is all training for eventually settling down and investing in a long-term relationship with a partner.

Playing the Field: Becoming a Swiss Army Knife

My first full-time design job was for Dennis Crowe, a faculty member at CCA (California College of the Arts, fka CCAC, California College of the Arts when I attended there). To this day, he’s still my favorite boss I’ve ever had. He’s the one who taught me that design is design is design. In my four years at Zimmermann Crowe Design, I worked on packaging, retail graphics, retail fixtures, retail store design, brochures, magazine ads, logos and identities, motion graphics, and websites. The clients I got to work on included big brands like Levi’s, Foot Locker, and Nike. But I also worked with local clientele like Bob ’n’ Sheila’s Edit World (a local video editing company), Marin Academy (a local private high school), and the San Francisco International Film Festival.

There was a thrill in walking into the studio and designing for multiple clients with varying sensibilities on their projects. I really had to learn how to flex not only my design aesthetics but also my problem-solving skills.

I’d juggle multiple projects at a time. I might work on a retail fixture for Levi’s, specifying metals and powder coats, while also sketching on a logo for a photo lab.

The reason I left ZCD was that I had learned all that I could and wanted to work on websites. It was 1999 in San Francisco, at the peak of the multimedia Gold Rush. I wanted to be a part of that. So, I joined USWeb/CKS and began working on Levi.com. Despite having designed only two websites by that point in my career—my portfolio site and ZCD’s site—I was hired at a digital agency. To be fair, back then, CKS did a lot of print still; Apple and Kinko’s were both clients, and the firm did all their marketing.

During my tenure at USWeb/CKS (which then became marchFIRST), I worked on digital campaigns for Levi’s—including the main dot-com, microsites, and emails—web stuff for Apple and Sega, website pitches for Harley-Davidson and Toys “R” Us, and Pixar.com. Again, very different aesthetics, approaches, and strategies for each of those brands.

My career in agencies led to more brands, both consumer and B2B. My projects continued to include marketing sites but soon encompassed intranets, digital ads (aka banners), 360-degree advertising campaigns (brand and product launches), videos, owner events and experiences, and applications.

Working in agencies was exceptional training for me to become a generalist and a multipurpose Swiss Army knife.

Agencies: Built for Perfection

The other great thing about working at agencies is the built-in structure. If you’ve watched Mad Men you’ve seen it. On one side is account, or client services. Like Roger Sterling, they ensure the client is happy, but they’re also the voice of the customer internally. They’ll look at the work, put on their client hat, and make sure it’s on strategy and the client will be satisfied. On the other side is creative. Like Don Draper and his merry pranksters, they come up with the ideas. Extrapolate that to today’s world, and it’s just slightly more complicated. Strategy or planning, production, technology, and delivery, i.e., project management, are added to the mix. And if you’re in an ad agency, you also have media. (Harry Crane’s gotta go somewhere!)

As a creative, you must sell your work through a gauntlet of gatekeepers. Not only will your creative higher-ups approve the work—or at least give input—but so will all the other departments, including account. They’ll poke holes in your strategy and force you to consider the details. You’ll go back and iterate and do it all over again. By the time the client sees it, it’s pretty damn near perfect.

Back then, design agencies rarely had retainers and weren’t agencies of record like most advertising shops. The industry soon changed as the stability of being an AoR for a brand meant being able to hire dedicated teams. One hundred percent allocated creatives meant solutions improved through deeper familiarity with the client’s brand. The benefit of the perspective of the agency was still present because of the way they’re organized. Day-to-day designers, copywriters, art directors, project managers, and account managers are dedicated. But as you go up the hierarchy, creative directors, group creative directors, executive creative directors, and their departmental peers are on multiple accounts. They use this more “worldly” perspective to ensure their teams’ output is on trend, following industry best practices, and relevant. When I was GCD at LEVEL Studios, I oversaw design across many Silicon Valley enterprise brands simultaneously—Cisco, NetApp, VMware, and Marvell.

In-House: Go Deeper

Eventually, whether it’s because of age, maturity, wisdom, or just plain exhaustion, I realized agency life is a young person’s game. The familiarity of working on the same brand, talking to the same audience, and solving similar problems is comforting. I’m not alone, as so many friends have ended up at Salesforce, Apple, and Meta.

Agency life is about exploring different creative identities—just like dating. But in-house work lets you go deeper, building a shared creative language with a single partner: your brand.

While I worked for Apple and Pixar in-house for a few years, that was in the middle of my career. I’d soon return to agency life at Razorfish, PJA, and Rosetta. By the time I got to TrueCar, I had done and seen so much. It was easy for me to take on inforgraphics, pitch decks, publications, motion graphics, and more. I built a strong creative team of nine to take on nearly everything except for above-the-line advertising.

That’s not to say there’s nothing new to learn in a marriage—or working in-house. There’s a ton. But it requires the maturity to want play the long game.

It’s about building relationships and the buzzword I keep hearing these days—alignment. Alignment is about influence, selling your work, and building consensus. Instead of the gauntlet of creative gatekeepers I mentioned earlier, being in-house gives you more design and creative authority and ownership, as long as you can convince others of your expertise.

For me, I can. I’ve spent more than half my career in agencies and worked on dozens of brands across hundreds of projects. I’ve seen a lot and done a lot.

Many designers new to UX or product design rely on user research for many decisions. This is what is taught in schools and boot camps. It’s a best practice that should only be used when the answers aren’t obvious. I suppose obviousness is relative. More senior designers who’ve designed a lot will arrive at answers more quickly because they’ve solved similar problems or seen other apps solve similar problems. Velocity is paramount for startups. Testing something obvious, i.e., has been previously solved, slows the business down. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

From Boot Camps to Product Teams

I’m not quite sure what the state of the agency is today. I see a rise in boutique shops but also a consolidation in the large players. Omnicom and IPG have announced a $20 billion merger to compete against Publicis Groupe and WPP. A report from Forrester last year predicted that generative AI might eliminate as many as 30,000 jobs from ad agencies by 2030. So, what are the prospects for young designers who want to work at agencies first? I don’t know, but it might be much harder to get a job than when I was coming up.

Early-career designers can still get agency-like experience in startups or tech companies, where wearing multiple hats provides a crash course in breadth. They’ll have opportunities to level up quickly. But without mentors or structured guidance, the learning curve can be steep.

Breadth and Depth

While I might be stretching this metaphor of short-term versus long-term relationships a bit—and I do apologize—there are other ways of thinking about this. Medical students rotate through many different specialties to get a feel for which one they might want to focus on. Heck, I would argue it’s similar for undeclared college students as well.

There’s value in the shotgun approach when you’re early in your career. (Sorry for mixing my metaphors again!) In the early stages of your career, variety helps you explore. Later, you’ll face a choice: stick with variety or embrace stability. Not that there can’t be variety in being client-side. Of course, that can happen via different product lines, audiences, and even sub-brands. The sandbox will be just a little smaller.

Stephen Beck wasn’t questioning the value of agencies. He wondered why the New York Times would have an external one since they already have an internal one. Agencies give perspective, which you need for brand campaigns. It’s easy for in-house creatives to get sucked into the company’s mission and forget how the outside world sees them. Perspective through breadth is the currency of agencies. In contrast, you get more profound insights via depth by being in-house.

I believe working in both types of organizations is part of a designer’s journey. Dating teaches you breadth and adaptability, while commitment lets you dive deep and create lasting value. The key is knowing when it’s time to shift gears.