Working with a Graphic Designer: What to Expect
If you are working with a designer for the first time, there could be heaps of terminology and processes you are not familiar with. And as you may have already discovered, it is a bit more in-depth than just having a bit of artwork created.
Benefiting from the Best
If you or your business needs regular design work, it pays to build a solid relationship with ONE designer.
This way you don’t have to start over and try and find a creative who ‘gets’ you, your brand or your products.
The right designer should have a vested interest in your brand, business and products. First and foremost they should be thinking about future-proofing ways to help you streamline projects together. Your designer works alongside you to create brand collateral that seamlessly integrates across all your marketing channels and platforms.
But most importantly, the right designer will always strive to create your designs in the most cost-effective manner.
For example; instead of reinventing the wheel every time you run an advert or a flyer, they will keep a suite of ad templates that cohesively works across all digital and print sizes and mediums. Essentially all you need to do is send them a reference and your designer will be able to pull your previous collateral to use as a base concept.
That’s when you’ll see the benefits of working with an organised designer who has your best interests at heart.
The Right Fit
It is essential that you make time to find out if you and your designer are the right fit for each other. It doesn’t matter how good either of you are at what you do, if you don’t gel, everything will be difficult every step of the way.
Once you starting working with the right designer, you will naturally begin to build a relationship with them. When you are on the same page, everything just works and instead of spending lots of expensive time figuring out the process for every project, you can just get on and do the fun stuff.
If it’s not so much fun, or you just don’t ‘gel’, it could either be that perhaps:
a. You are not able to explain what you want in a constructive way. Or
b. it simply can just be that perhaps you just aren’t the same wavelength or the right fit together.
And that’s totally ok, there’s a designer out there for everyone.
What to Expect
When you commission a designer to create artwork, ads, logos, websites or any other design collateral for you, you are paying for the finished product. The business card, website, brochure, magazine layout or social media artwork and such.
Your designer should always supply you a print or web-ready file but will retain the native design file (it is not typically included as part of your finished product unless this has been agreed upon).
Finished Products
As a client, you will receive the final artwork file. The final artwork file is either a high-resolution print-ready file with crop marks and bleed for printing. Or a high-resolution file in a different format that is web-ready or suitably responsive.
You will usually need special software to open the web-ready version and neither file can be edited or changed.
Your designer is obligated (provided your account are up-to-date) to provide a finished product so you can supply this to your printer, social media manager or web designer and they will be able to print or present your finished work in the format for which it was intended to perfection.
If you just don’t love working with your graphic designer, you might not be the right fit. Find out what the process should look like here.