So, you want a website, a new business card or a rad logo for your business. You’ve found a designer, that comes highly recommended and you’ve scheduled a meeting with said designer. How do you prepare for that first meeting, especially when you’ve never worked with a designer before?
In my experience, most designers are a strange hybrid of wildly creative and ridiculously type-A, a combination that makes us good at what we do. It’s a good idea to make sure that you have your ducks in a row. What do you really want from your designer? If you want a business card but don’t have a logo or wordmark*, do you want a logo or wordmark? If you want a website, have you thought about how the information should be organized? Who your audience is? If you want a logo, have you thought about what makes your business unique and what might be meaningful in a logo design? (For example, the logo I just designed for Urban Stream Innovation has a 49° angle in it, because the company is on the 49th parallel and parts of their greenhouses will be at a 49° angle. In fact, did you know that latitude determines at which angle roofing and solar panels should be installed to maximize the collection of sunlight? So neat, right?!) A designer can help you think through all of these questions, but the end product you get from your designer will be infinitely better if you consider these things before meeting with them. And as a bonus: it will also help your designer create an accurate estimate for you.
It’s also a good idea to have your information organized. Designers love to come up with great ideas, try raucous colour combinations and expand your concepts fun and exciting ways, but when it gets down to brass tacks, we love a client who delivers information in a logical way. It’s fairly unlikely that you’ll deliver all of the content for your new website to your designer in the very first meeting, but you may deliver the copy for your business card or a list of pages that you want included in the information architecture of your website. Whenever possible, deliver your content in as complete a form as you can. It doesn’t mean that your content is set in stone but it does mean editing! Make sure that you read through what you’re handing over, just in case you left something super important out, or you accidentally wrote the word pubic instead of public. The more changes that you send to your designer later on, the more of their hours you’re going to rack up, and we all know that time is money.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions! Designers throw around lots of weird terms like high res, SEO, kerning, HTML5 … If you don’t know what we’re talking about, let us know. The more we know about you and what you know, the easier it is for us to help you. Also, if you’re not sure of the process from getting from the first meeting to your gleaming, gorgeous new website, ask us to explain it. The more that gets sorted out at the beginning, the more likely your project will go smoothly.
Any designers out there: what would you add to this list? And anyone else: what do you want to know about design and the design process?
*A wordmark is a typographic treatment of the name of a company (or person) — think the Google logo. A logo is a graphic-based treatment or representation of a company — think the Nike swoosh.
Kate Moore Hermes 