Building the Bench: How We Staff Projects
Clients who come to us after seeing work like Volt Lites, which picked up Awwwards or CSS Design Awards this year, usually assume there’s a large studio behind it. A dedicated motion team. An in-house illustrator. A floor of designers somewhere.
There isn’t. There’s a small senior core team that knows how to bring in the right specialist at the right moment.
We’ve spent the last several years building what we internally call the bench: a roster of designers, animators, and front-end specialists we’ve worked with before, trust, and can pull into a project when the scope calls for it. It’s the single biggest reason we can take on enterprise work without carrying enterprise overhead. Here’s how we’ve built it.
We hire for the gap, not for the org chart
Most agencies staff up around a hypothetical future. They hire a motion designer because motion feels like something an agency should have, then spend six months finding projects to justify the salary.
We do the reverse. When a project needs something our core team can’t deliver at the level the work deserves, that’s when we go looking. A B2B SaaS client needed a complex product visualization we weren’t going to fake with stock 3D. We found someone who does that specific thing exceptionally well, brought them in for six weeks, and the result was better than anything we’d have produced by stretching.
The discipline is in being honest about the gap. It is very tempting to convince yourself you can handle everything in house. That instinct has cost us more than one project.
What we actually screen for
Portfolio quality is table stakes. It’s also the thing that tells us the least, because a portfolio shows someone’s best work under ideal conditions, and almost no agency project runs under ideal conditions.
Three things matter more:
Can they work inside someone else’s system? Most of our projects involve an existing design system, a client brand book, or both. A designer who can only work from a blank canvas is not useful to us. We look for portfolio pieces that are clearly constrained, where you can see someone doing sharp work inside a tight box.
Do they write back? The best predictor of how a contractor will behave in week five is how they communicate in week zero. Slow, vague responses during scoping become slow, vague responses when a deadline is moving.
Have they shipped, or just designed? There’s a meaningful difference between a designer whose work has survived a development handoff and one whose work has only ever existed in Figma. The former has had to make compromises and knows which ones are worth fighting over.
Where we look
Referrals from people we’ve worked with are still the highest-signal source, and always will be. A designer vouched for by a developer we trust starts several rounds ahead.
Past collaborators are the second. We keep in touch with nearly everyone who’s done good work with us, and a meaningful share of our bench is people we’ve brought back three or four times.
For everything outside those two circles, we use Dribbble’s hiring platform, which is where we go when a project needs a specific skill nobody in our network has. The advantage over a general freelance marketplace is that the work is the profile. You’re evaluating someone on output rather than on a self-reported skills list, which cuts a lot of noise out of the first pass.
What this means if you’re hiring us
You’re getting a small, senior core team that has run this process enough times to know who to call. The specialist working on your motion system has probably worked with us before. The person building your WordPress templates has shipped on Pantheon a dozen times.
You’re also getting an agency with no incentive to push your project toward the skills we happen to have on payroll this quarter. We scope the work the project needs, then we go get the people to do it.
That’s the whole model. It’s not complicated, but it takes years to build the bench that makes it possible.
Nika is a boutique web design and WordPress agency working with nonprofits, B2B technology companies, and enterprise clients. Get in touch if you have a project in mind.