How to work with a Graphic Designer

A lot of people will be forced to encounter a Graphic Designer in their careers. Whether you’re a business owner, an entrepreneur, or a marketer, working with designers may need to become your bread and butter in order to efficiently and effectively move towards your aesthetic goals. But where does one learn how to deal with such an individual? How do you prepare? What do they need to succeed? Why do they insist on wearing hats that are much too small for their heads?

With a lot of service providers, you pay the fee and they do the rest, if you need a designer however it’s a two-way street and there’s a certain amount of teamwork involved to get what you want.

Here are a few pointers that I think are essential in getting the best out of your project with a Graphic Designer:

Be clear and concise

I know it can be very exciting to embark on the visual journey of your project and the possibilities can be overwhelming to imagine but you need to remain focused and communicate specifically what it is you want without too much guesswork on the other end. It is half the designer’s responsibility to extract the right information from you in order to get to the desired result but it is also half your own to communicate what that result is. This may require some time thinking and planning what it is you really want, prepare before you jump on a call or e-mail a designer and have it mapped out in your head as much as possible before passing the responsibility over. Remember that this is the first time your designer will hear about this project, it is better to over-explain than under-explain and it will save you both a lot of time and money in the process.

Think about particular colours you may desire for example, any overall aesthetics that come to mind when envisioning your final outcome (eg. “I do like that one advert that looks like…”) and who the target audience of your business is. You may think it’s the designer’s job to envisage your masterpiece by themselves fully and that creative free reign over a project must be a dream for them but ultimately this is highly impractical and the likelihood of someone you’ve barely met hitting the nail on the head first time is pretty slim. 

Put it this way: the client needs to set up the goalposts to enable the designer to score, you can only expect them to miss if they don’t have a target to aim for.

Manage expectations

This relates back to the previous point but in the practical sense. Be specific about what your project entails, how long, how much, and how soon you need it. If everything is laid out plainly for the pair of you to see, there can be no surprises or misunderstandings. A contract is useful to get this on paper before the project starts and in order to refer back to if the focus becomes lost.  

Trust your designer

Art is highly subjective and therefore one person’s opinions on a piece may differ entirely from another’s. Art is also very accessible in the modern age and most people fancy themselves as a bit of a creative in some way or another. In fact, most of my clients are creatives themselves; bakers, brewers, artists, marketers, musicians, writers, and entrepreneurs, these are people who know how to create and who create for a living. This makes my job a bit harder in that I have to appear to be doing something that they cannot, I have to do what they can do and then do a bit more on top and if they don’t see this they may be unsatisfied or worse… Try to do it themselves.

There’s nothing wrong with giving direction and nudging the designer down the route you most favour, after all, you are the client and as such are the director of the project, your vision is the goal. But taking the reigns entirely from the designer and attempting to design the project yourself is unwise and a waste of your own time and money. The reality is that there’s a lot happening behind the scenes that you don’t know about and although it is my hope that your designer can communicate all these crucial (but subtle) decisions and tweaks to you you may not always see the work that goes into the tiny square logo that you’re paying a bomb for. They will have vast experience playing with fonts and shapes and illustrations that will help them rule out things that they know won’t work, they will have made enough posters and websites to know what looks good and they will have had enough clients to know what will appeal to your target audience (relative to their experience in the field of course).

This is what you’re paying for, this know-how, these insights which working as a graphic designer will have granted them, try to trust that what they sent to you is thought through and they may know more than you do on the matter. After all, you chose them to do this work for you because you believed they could. Don’t pay them just to be your pencil, use their knowledge and know-how to progress your business and work together as a team. Listen to their ideas as well as look at their pretty pictures. Trust is key in the designer-client relationship

Don’t apologise for wanting it to be perfect

Amendments will always be slightly annoying, whatever job you’re in. But too many times have my clients apologised for wanting just one more thing changed “Sorry I’m being so picky”, “Sorry to be a nag”. Remember it is the designer’s job to notice the fine details and as long as the amendments are paid for then they are part of the job. Of course, this can go both ways and you could sit there for eternity asking whether or not the Nike swoosh is to the exact angle to perfectly embody your ethereal message directly to your target audience telepathically so do be mindful that at some point you have to call it a day.

As creatives, we have to come to terms with the fact that sometimes more work doesn’t lead you closer to perfection and when to call something finished is an art within itself as there is no right or wrong answer. So to sum up, trust in your designer’s intuition that what they’ve sent to you they consider to be enough but also don’t be shy to say it’s not right.

In conclusion

Designers are people just like you, so just be kind and genuine and things will work out. To boil it down this is a professional who is equipped to communicate your ideas visually and so it is your job to communicate to them what those ideas are. Be collaborative, have good intentions and have fun. This is a chance to bring beauty to your business and if they’re anything like me your designer will be as keen and excited as you are to jump in on your project and smash it out of the park.