Services — Design & Communication Collateral
Graphic Design Agency
Ellington & Vale is a graphic design agency working with Indian brands across print, digital and packaging. The distinction that matters: we design systems rather than producing artwork job by job, because a hundred well-made pieces that don't agree with each other still add up to a brand nobody recognises.
The difference between design and design production
Most businesses buying graphic design are buying production — a brochure, a set of social posts, a stall graphic, a deck. Each brief arrives separately, gets executed competently, and refers to nothing before it.
Two years of that leaves a company with a large volume of material and no visual identity, because identity is not a quality that individual pieces have. It is a consistency across them.
The alternative is a system underneath the production: type, colour, grid, image treatment and layout logic decided once, so every subsequent piece inherits them and each new brief starts from a position rather than a blank page. That is slower for the first project and much faster for the twentieth.
What we design
Print — brochures, company profiles, catalogues, reports, stationery and the material that gets handed across a table.
Digital — social systems, campaign assets, presentations, email templates and web graphics.
Packaging — structure and artwork, covered properly on our packaging design page.
Editorial and information design — annual reports, data visualisation and long-form documents where the design problem is comprehension rather than decoration.
Environmental — signage, wayfinding and exhibition graphics.
Typography, which is most of it
Most of what separates competent design from good design in this market is typographic, and most of what goes wrong is too.
Type choice, hierarchy, spacing and restraint account for the majority of whether a document reads as considered. And in India there is a second layer most work ignores: Devanagari and other Indic scripts are routinely set as an afterthought — dropped in at whatever size fits, in a face that doesn't sit with the Latin, on a baseline that doesn't align.
A brand operating in more than one script and setting only one of them properly is telling a portion of its audience which one matters. Designing both to the same standard is not a courtesy, it is the job.
Working with an in-house team
Many companies with an internal designer or marketing team don't need an agency producing everything — they need a system their own team can execute against, and support on the pieces that need outside craft.
That's a legitimate and frequently better arrangement: we build the system and the templates, the in-house team runs the day-to-day volume, and we handle the work that genuinely needs specialist attention. It costs the client less and it works better than an agency being briefed on every social post.
Guidelines that get used
Most brand guidelines documents are ignored, and it is usually the guidelines' fault — 90 pages of theory, no templates, and no answer to the practical question the person actually has at 6pm on a deadline.
Guidelines that get used are structured around real situations: here is how a presentation is built, here is a social template, here is what to do when the logo has to go on a dark background, here are the files. Shorter, more specific and more useful than the document that wins the design award.
What determines the cost
No published rates. What drives it: whether this is a system build or ongoing production; volume and range of material; whether a retainer arrangement makes sense versus project-by-project; and how much of the underlying brand work already exists.
Tell us what you produce and how often, and we'll tell you honestly which arrangement fits.
FAQ
- What does a graphic design agency do?
- Designs the visual material a business communicates through — print, digital, packaging, environmental — and, done properly, the system underneath it that keeps a hundred separate pieces recognisably from the same company.
- What's the difference between a graphic design agency and a branding agency?
- Branding decides what the company stands for and how it should look and sound. Graphic design applies that across the material. We do both, which is why this page sits under our design practice rather than standing alone — a design agency without the strategic layer produces well-made work that doesn't accumulate into anything.
- Do you work on retainer or per project?
- Both. Retainers suit companies producing material continuously; project work suits defined builds. If you're producing a steady volume, a retainer is usually cheaper and materially better, because the work stops being briefed from scratch each time.
- Can you work with our in-house designer?
- Yes, and it's often the right structure — we build the system and handle specialist pieces, your team runs the volume.
- How much does graphic design cost in India?
- No published rates — see above.
Your Next World
Let's create something distinctive.
Tell us what you are building. We will help give it the clarity, character and presence to be recognised.