The Hidden Cost of Operational Design Tasks
Design is creative. Your week? Not so much.
If you’re like most graphic designers, you didn’t get into this field to spend your time on tasks like resizing files, formatting presentations, searching for files and deciphering vague client feedback. But that’s exactly where a huge chunk of your week goes.
In fact, according to our research with over 1,200 designers, the average designer loses 18 to 22 hours a week to non-creative, operational tasks—mundane work that could (and should) be automated.
That’s nearly half the week.
The real price of “just doing it manually”
We ran the numbers. On a team of 100 designers, those 18 hours per person add up to a staggering $28 million in lost revenue per year.
Now let’s talk about you. Imagine what you could do with:
3 more hours each day to spend on pushing concepts further, iterating on designs, and nurturing your creative potential
A workflow that doesn’t make you dread end of project file handoffs
Fewer late nights cobbling together mock ups and brand presentations in tools like Google Slides and Indesign.
For most designers, the frustration isn’t the work—it’s the friction. The time between ideas and execution is filled with detours, duplicate tasks, and disjointed tools.
Why this problem persists
Operational design tasks have always been seen as “part of the job.” But they’ve quietly evolved into time-sucking monsters:
Feedback has become a maze of Slack threads, email chains, and vague annotations.
Proposals and presentations take hours to format, often repeated from scratch.
Revisions and resizes require jumping between tools, recreating the same asset five different ways.
Most design teams deal with this in one of three ways:
Hire more people to pick up the slack.
Build custom templates and processes—which still require time and significant manual effort.
Burn out—accepting inefficiency as the cost of doing business.
We believe there’s a fourth option: automate the friction.
You were hired to design, not to babysit files
That’s why we built Ideate—an AI-enhanced design workspace built specifically for the operational parts of the process that we all hate.
We’re not here to replace your creativity. We’re here to remove the blocks between your ideas and the moment they come to life.
The time you spend preparing files, consolidating feedback, and placing images in mockups? That’s not the work. That’s what gets in the way of the work.
What’s next
Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing what we’ve learned from 1,200+ designers, and giving you a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re rethinking every part of the creative process—from onboarding to handoff.
If you’ve ever felt like your tools aren’t built for the way designers actually work, you’re not alone. We’re building Ideate for you.