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DesignShifu Review: Should You Use This Unlimited Graphic Design Service?

Looking for unlimited graphic design services? Here, I will review a service called Design Shifu that does exactly that.

I was approached by the owner who offered to try the service for 14 days in exchange for a review. 

All opinions and conclusions are mine 🤓

Design Shifu is a great alternative to hiring a freelancer if you have ongoing graphic design work.  It saves you the legwork of finding, hiring, and managing a high-quality designer 👩‍🎨👨‍🎨

I used them to create images for this blog as well as for my niche websites. While I cannot share with you the niche website images (for obvious reasons 😉), I will show you what Design Shifu created for LivingOffCloud.

What is Design Shifu?

It’s an unlimited graphic design service where you can design anything you want, from logos to t-shirts to ads and social media pictures, for a flat price.

Who’s this service is for?

Design Shifu is for anyone who needs custom graphics: bloggers, niche webmasters, social media marketers, businesses who use PPC ads on Facebook, Google, Instagram, and other platforms 😊

Design Shifu designers can make pretty much anything for you:

• Logos
• Branding
• T-shirts
• Social media images
• Infographics
• Flyers and brochures
• Ad banners

Some of the well-known companies use Design Shifu. For example:

• Bluehost
• Basking Robbins
• Sensuel
• And more

Pricing

Design Shifu offers three plans, two of which are limited and one is unlimited.

If you need to create only one simple design once in a while, you should go with the Pay Per Request plan 💲

If you have a moderately steady flow of graphic design work that does not require custom illustrations, choose the Monthly Limited Plan 💲💲

If you have a lot of design work and need custom illustrations, a dedicated designer, and faster turnaround time, the Monthly Unlimited Plan might be what you need 💲💲💲

There are no hidden fees apart from the price specified on their website.

The Monthly Unlimited Plan also offers 14-day trial in a form of money back guarantee.

How to work with Design Shifu

For my trial, I used the Monthly Unlimited Plan for $299 with 1  Active Request and Unlimited # of brands. The turnaround time is said to be 24h but in my case, it was more like 12-18h.

Sign up

First, you need to choose the plan and then sign up.

You will be asked to fill out a form with your brand info, social media, etc.

Once you do it, you will be redirected to the form to submit your request 📤

Submitting your request

Design Shifu has a 3-page (semi) convenient form to submit your design requests.

On the first page, you fill out the most important details:

• The design name
• Size
• Design notes and examples
• The target audience for your design
• What you are looking for and what you are not looking for

On the second page, you can choose photos that will go with your design. Design Shifu offers you a grid the Unsplash photos that you can filter based on your keywords.

On this page, you can also specify what formats you would like to get for your design: PSD, AI, PDF, etc.

On the third page, you can upload your own assets and submit your design for work.

Also, you will be required to confirm that you described and/or uploaded everything you needed correctly.

That’s it!

After that, you will get a confirmation email and then, an email with the first version of your design.

Then, depending on your plan, you may submit requests to fix or adjust the design.

Once you are satisfied with the design, you may request the source files 😀

Past requests

In your dashboard, you can also see your past requests 👍

I found it pretty convenient when I need to submit the same requirements again and again. I would just go to the past requests and copy-paste it from there.

Settings

In the settings, you can see everything related to your account:

• Billing history
• You plan
• Your credit card and address
• etc

You can also pause your account autorenewal if you do not plan to continue with the service for the next month 😴

In the settings, you can also specify the default file types you would like to get your designs formatted to. This is very convenient since you will probably rarely change these kinds of settings.

When your subscription is about to end

It may happen that your subscription ends before your last design is finalized.

In this case, Design Shifu generally finish the job at hand and send you the source files. 

If you decide to add a new request that is relatively small just a few hours or a day before the subscription expires, they will do the job and send you the files.

However, if you end up adding a big request (for example, a 15-page brochure) just a few hours before the subscription ends, Design Shifu would encourage you to renew the subscription before they start working on it.

Design Shifu review

In general, I think Design Shifu is a very solid service that can help you grow your websites further 👍

Design Shifu pros

What I liked the best

First of all, their designs looked very professional (to me). I really hate the bad design so I was pleasantly surprised by the quality I got from Design Shifu 👍

Their turnaround time was very good. For me, it was even better than advertised: 12-18h instead of 24h 👍

The price point also looks very attractive 💸

Apart from unlimited design services, they offer limited design options. This can be something you are looking for if you have a low volume of design work. 

For the Monthly Limited Plan, the credits you did not use during the previous month get carried-over to the next month if you pay for the next month.

You submit your design requests via an online form. I liked it because it made my requests much more structural and helped me to avoid missing important details.

In the nutshell

• Professional design
• Very fast turnaround time
• Attractive price without compromising on the design quality
• Monthly Limited Plan credits can be carried over to the next month
• A convenient way to submit your request via an online form

Design Shifu cons

As of the downsides, I didn’t find any major ones except the fact that they have a limited pool of free imaged to use.

Small pool of licensed images

When you submit a design request that requires photos (and not just icons or vector graphics), you can either choose images from Unsplash or upload your own images.

It’s possible that the designer won’t be able to use Unsplash images you chose as well as to find other free or licensed images.

If you are on the most expensive Unlimited plan, the designer will offer to create custom illustrations instead. This can be a good workaround; however, this may increase the turnover time.

If you are on a limited plan, the designer may end up using images taken from Google 😒 The designer will tell you about it, of course, so you will be able to prepare your images and request the change.

Unfortunately, they do not mention it in the description on the plan 😒 When it happened to me, I got quite upset.

So most likely, if your designs require custom photos, you would need to have access to licensed images on your end to use the Design Shifu service, especially if you are on the limited plans 😒

Other cons

The email workflow was not very convenient to use because the emails about the same task did not get threaded up in Gmail.

Not all the requirements might be done from the beginning. It happened to me once or twice.

This might be critical if you are on the cheapest plan with a limited number of revisions.

In the nutshell

• Limited pool of free images to use in designs
• The email workflow is not very convenient
• Not all the requirements might be done from the beginning

How does Design Shifu compare to the other unlimited design services?

Here, I compared the cheapest unlimited plans of various unlimited design services.

As you can see, Design Shifu is among the three cheapest unlimited design services. What makes them stand out is the turnover time ⏰

They also offer limited design services, which none of the competitors has.

The Monthly Limited Plan has 5 requests. If you did not use all the requests (or credits), the unused credits are carried over to the next month if you pay for the next month.

My results with Design Shifu

I used Design Shifu for 14 days as a free trial.

During this time, I managed to create 7 moderately complex infographics.

For most of the tasks, I requested to do changes only once or twice. 

Here are the infographics they created for one of the posts in this blog. I asked for one design but they sent me two for some reason 🤷‍♀️

First version:

Second version:

You can compare it with what the other unlimited design services I reviewed provided: the Kapa99 design and MeetAnders design.

Conclusion

Overall, I liked Design Shifu and I may hire them in the future.

I will most likely use the Monthly Limited Plan to make infographics because my design needs are not very high. I really like the idea of credit carry-over. It removes the pressure of providing enough work every single month.

What do you think guys? Leave your comments below!