About Colleen Eakins

Colleen Eakins is a senior level graphic designer, art director and marketing enthusiast. Her path to the field of graphic design had an interesting start in that, until her senior year of high school, she wanted to be a scientist. Specifically, a chemist.

She was a crafty and artistic child growing up, but never thought one could actually make a living with artistic pursuits. The age old ‘starving artist’ label is what came to mind. She knew that she wanted a career in a field she was interested in so that work would never feel like work and that’s how science entered the picture. When her head wasn’t buried in a book or a sketch pad, she was conducting science ‘experiments’ with household items, which led to her winning at selected science fairs in her community.

During her senior year of high school, a college recruiter visited her school to promote a new multi-media program they had just started. She was intrigued by the program but of the three disciplines (audio/visual; animation; graphic design), she was only interested in the graphic design portion. It combined two things she loved – computers and art.

After some research, she learned that graphic design was offered at some colleges as a stand-alone discipline and a degreed program. She had also learned through her research that the chemistry degree track at most colleges required an automatic minor in math…which was not her favorite subject.

Graphic design for the win!

She furthered her education after landing her first graphic designer role, by pursuing a MBA with a concentration in Marketing. She chose marketing because she realized that what she did as a designer was to support marketing efforts and she was also tired of being introduced as an afterthought as ‘just a designer’ in business meetings with vendors. Colleen feels that the additional marketing knowledgebase helps to round her out as a designer and she approaches her design from this perspective.

The Start of Colleen Eakins Design

In 2002, Colleen started Colleen Eakins Design as a part-time business, when she was mid-way through her graphic design program in college. She started the business as a way to earn extra money and to build her portfolio with real-world pieces versus the class projects that typically fill new design graduates’ portfolios. She felt it would help set her apart from other job applicants when she finished with her degree program.

For years, Colleen used the business to freelance, earn extra income, and gain additional experience in other sectors and industries outside of what she did in her full-time designer role in Corporate America. While working as a contract designer for 3M, she decided to take a leap of faith when the contract ended and take her business full-time. In 2011, Colleen Eakins Design was fully instated.

What is Colleen Eakins Design?

Colleen Eakins Design (CED) is a design firm that specializes in print and digital marketing collateral & assets for small to medium size businesses. Capabilities include web design, logo design and branding, and printing for select collateral.

The mission of Colleen Eakins Design is to help clients achieve their visual marketing needs and reach their marketing goals with the visuals provided through effective graphic design.

“Anyone can make a pretty picture, but is it effective?” Through CED’s approach of graphic design from a marketing perspective, the answer to that question is “yes!”

Colleen Eakins Design’s unique selling proposition is through the treatment of our clients. We value their industry expertise to inform our initial discussions and adhere to a very communicative and open environment to ensure the best service and product of each client need.

Make-up of Company and Staff

As a fully distributed company, staff is fully remote and located through-out the country, although, mostly situated within the Midwest and Eastern Coast of the United States.

As the owner, Colleen operates as Sr. Designer and Art Director of Colleen Eakins Design. Pending the needs of clients, there are up to three rotating design contractors, along with a part-time Project Manager/Content Specialist to facilitate the design of assets.

With such a dispersed staff, certain programs are needed to effectively communicate and facilitate the flow of projects. The two main programs used in CED are Slack and Basecamp. Slack is an instant messenger that allows team member to speak to each other about quick needs of projects. Basecamp houses all project details, tracking information and provides the ability to directly communicate to the client on updates and reviews.

Wins & Work-Improvements

Overall, the client experience is of the up-most importance to the team at CED. This is what differentiates CED from the competition. Client pain-points from competitors are unclear communication, long lag-times for communication/feedback from the design team and often times, the disappearance of the designer.

From our client feedback, clients like the systems, process, and workflows we have in place. Top professionalism, easy to work with, and personable staff to build strong relationship with each client. Prompt and quick communication is also an aspect of business Colleen Eakins Design prides itself on.

With every success story, there are ways for a business to improve. Although rare, misunderstandings of design can happen from either party, due to the subjective nature of creativity. Opportunities of how to alleviate the possibilities of miscommunication are always under review internally to better serve our clients.

Colleen Eakins Design Company Growth

With a wide range of competition, encompassing every freelance graphic designer and small design firms mainly within the Atlanta area, constant education and company offerings must be reviewed to attract the right clients.

Within the next 2-5 years, the goals of Colleen Eakins Design are to onboard around three more regular design staff members to help in the rotation of client work.  Increase the hours for the Project Manager within the areas blog content, client facilitation and support of CED marketing campaigns. The CED marketing campaigns will be a focus as the company is currently reviewing their marketing efforts to build awareness and bring in more clients with ongoing needs that range from small production items to full creative suites.

The future is looking bright for Colleen Eakins Design and we invite you to come along for the ride – it won’t be a bumpy one, we promise!