Designer at a Marketing Agency: What They Do Every Day, What Portfolio to Show, and How to Pass the Test Assignment

In Short

In a single week, a designer at a marketing agency touches an ad banner, story covers, a client presentation, and a brand-book page. The work differs from product design in its pace and variety, and from freelance in having a team, briefs, and feedback from marketers who measure results in leads. Below: how agency work is different, what a typical week looks like, how to work with a brand book and a brief, which 10 pieces to put in a portfolio, what we expect from a test assignment, what we ask at interviews, where to grow, and the six mistakes we see most often in candidates. Written from MOVE Agency’s own experience hiring designers, where design work is mostly done for HoReCa, retail, dental clinics, and service businesses.

Agency, Product, or Freelance: What’s the Difference

Designers often choose between three formats, and each one asks for a different temperament.

At an agency, you’ll see more niches and formats in a year than you would in five years at a product company. It’s the fastest way to build a broad portfolio and figure out what you actually like. The price is pace: a task that lands in the morning often needs to be with the client by evening.

A good agency designer does good enough work at the right time without losing the brand’s identity. The prettiest mockup isn’t the main criterion here.

A Typical Week for an Agency Designer

MOVE’s designer listing describes four areas: results-focused ad banners for Instagram and Facebook, brand books, moodboards, and visual identity, social media brand styling from stories to covers, and work mostly with HoReCa. In practice, a week looks roughly like this.

• Monday. Planning meeting with project managers and the social media team: which posts and stories each brand needs for the week. Then a series of social creatives against the content calendar.
• Tuesday. Ad banners for the media buyer: three to five variants of one offer for A/B testing, adapted for feed, stories, and a Reel cover.
• Wednesday. Identity work for a new client: a moodboard, two or three logo concepts, picking a palette and typography. This is the longest and most enjoyable type of task.
• Thursday. A strategy presentation for a client: turning a marketer’s document into 20 slides that are easy to present in a meeting. Plus revisions on yesterday’s banners.
• Friday. A landing page mockup or a few site screens for the dev team, printed materials for a venue: menus, table tents, stickers.

The mix shifts with the season: promo creatives dominate before holidays, summer brings more shoots and new-venue styling. But the blend of formats itself stays constant, and that’s what you need to be ready for.

Speed vs. Quality: How Not to Lose Either

The most common question from designers coming out of product or freelance work: how do you keep the quality up when there are this many tasks. The answer is in the system: heroics don’t help here.

1. Templates and components. Every brand on retainer needs a library: post grids, story styles, covers, banner templates for ad formats. A new creative then becomes a variation instead of a start from scratch.
2. A “good enough” standard. A promo banner that’ll live three days in ads doesn’t need two hours of polish. A logo that’ll live for years does. Telling the two apart is the core skill of an agency designer.
3. One queue. The project manager sets task priority; how loud the request is doesn’t. If you decide for yourself what to do first, you’re doing the manager’s job and losing time.
4. Batched feedback. Agree that notes on a mockup get collected into one list instead of seven messages throughout the day.

Speed comes from staying organized. A designer who keeps files, layers, and names clean can turn out a banner in 20 minutes without losing quality.

Working With a Brand Book: Constraints That Free You Up

At an agency, you rarely start from a blank page. Most brands arrive with their own style, and your job is to work inside it. A brand book sets the logo and its clear space, the palette, fonts, photo rules, and illustration tone. A good brand book speeds up work: you don’t have to reinvent which shade and which font every single time.

When there’s no brand book, or it’s outdated, the agency designer is often the one who creates it. At MOVE, that’s a dedicated service: brand book and guidelines with usage rules, templates, and documentation, so the style holds even when a different person builds the layouts. The ability to write a document like this is what sets a mid-level designer and above apart.

A case from practice: for the Yavir-2000 security company from Kremenchuk, the team did a rebrand, then handled social media, content, and video production in the new style. Without a clear set of rules, day-to-day content would quickly have drifted from the updated look, and the identity work would have gone to waste. We broke down what this process looks like from the inside in the article on company rebranding.

The Brief and Feedback: How to Avoid Five Rounds of Revisions

A designer at a marketing agency gets tasks through a brief: which brand, what’s the goal, for whom, what should the person do after seeing the design, what are the constraints. A weak brief remains the top cause of rework, so don’t be shy about asking questions before you start.

What to clarify if it’s missing from the brief:

• what the main action is: click through, book, come to the venue, remember;
• what single message should stick if someone sees the banner for one second;
• exactly where the design will be shown and on what screen;
• whether there are references the client likes and, more importantly, dislikes;
• what’s already been tested and didn’t work.

Feedback at an agency comes from three directions: the project manager, the marketer, and the client. Not all comments carry equal weight. “Make the logo bigger” from a client might mean “I don’t see our brand in this,” and then the fix is to strengthen the brand colors while leaving the logo as is. The ability to translate a note into the problem it describes is what separates a designer from someone who just pushes pixels.

Portfolio: 10 Pieces That Show Your Thinking

We look at the portfolio before we read the résumé. The most common mistake: 40 images with no context. Better to have 10 pieces, each telling a story: what the task was, what the constraints were, why this particular solution, what came out of it.

The ideal set for a candidate applying to an agency:

1. Identity from scratch: logo, palette, typography, applications.
2. A series of ad banners for one offer: show three variants built for testing and explain how they differ by hypothesis.
3. Social media account styling: a grid, highlight covers, story templates.
4. A presentation or proposal: 10–15 slides.
5. A landing page mockup or a few site screens.
6. Printed materials: a menu, a flyer, signage.
7. Work inside someone else’s brand book: show that you can work within constraints.
8. HoReCa work, if you have any: at MOVE, that’s the core niche.
9. A project with a result: a banner that drove leads, or a redesign after which engagement grew. If you have numbers, include them.
10. One piece you’re not proud of, with an explanation of what you’d change today. This shows maturity better than any case study.

Add three to five sentences to each piece: the task, the solution, the result. That’s what demonstrates your thinking.

The Test Assignment: What We’re Looking At

The test assignment at an agency is usually close to a real assignment: a series of social creatives or an ad banner from a short brief for one of the client brands. At MOVE, this is most often a HoReCa task, since that’s who the designer mostly works with.

Beyond the image itself, we assess five more things:

• Understanding of the task. Does the design match the brief’s goal, is the offer visible, is it clear what to do next.
• Working with the brand. Did you keep the client’s style, or did you make something pretty that reads as a different brand.
• Technical cleanliness. Correct sizes for each format, readability on a phone, tidy files.
• The questions you asked. A candidate who clarified two or three points before starting almost always turns in better work.
• Time. We’re not asking for speed. We do notice how long you spent and whether you hit the agreed deadline.

A tip: send the test assignment with a short cover note. One paragraph about your thinking often carries more weight than an extra variant.

Tools, the Interview, and Growth

Tools. The listing’s requirements are Figma, Adobe Photoshop, and Illustrator. More broadly: an editor for layouts and components, raster and vector graphics, basic animation for stories, a presentation tool. The specific apps matter less than how fast you work in them.

Questions to expect at the interview:

• Show a piece you’re proud of, and one the client rejected. What did you do next?
• How would you plan your day if eight tasks land in the morning, all due today?
• A client asks to “make it punchier.” What do you do?
• How do you check that a banner will work before it goes live in ads?
• What do you know about HoReCa, and how does restaurant design differ from dental clinic design?

That last question isn’t rhetorical. Compare: for the Parodent dental clinic network, the task was to present the clinic so patients would want to book instead of putting off the visit: content that builds trust, not anxiety. Advertising with that approach drove a 30% increase in bookings and a 23% cheaper lead. In a restaurant, appetite and energy do the work instead. A designer who feels that difference is valuable to an agency right away.

Growth. The typical path: a designer executing tasks from a brief; a senior designer who runs identity work and brand books independently; an art director who owns the visual quality of every brand on retainer, sets tasks for others, and takes part in strategy. The move happens the moment the team starts listening to your calls at the brief stage. Years of tenure don’t count here. Among MOVE’s listed conditions are internal training and growth, plus a large set of paid tools; Move School provides a broader base in marketing.

6 Mistakes Junior Designers Make at an Agency

1. Design for design’s sake. A pretty mockup with no offer and no action. At an agency, every banner has a job, and it either shows or it doesn’t.
2. Silence instead of questions. A candidate takes a brief with holes in it and builds the wrong thing. Questions before starting save days.
3. One variant instead of hypotheses. Ads need several approaches to test instead of one “correct” version.
4. Ignoring the brand book. Your own style laid over someone else’s brand is the fastest way to break the client’s and the project manager’s trust.
5. File chaos. Layers named “Layer 148 copy” and unnamed mockups slow down the whole team the moment someone else opens the file.
6. Taking feedback personally. Feedback at an agency is part of the process. It isn’t a judgment of you as a person. Whoever can hear the point behind the wording grows twice as fast.

If you recognized yourself in this, or the version of yourself you want to become, check the current openings on MOVE’s careers page: the designer role comes up periodically, and related positions in content and design appear regularly.