interfacing with your designer

If you ever end up starting your own business, or if you work in management or in marketing, chances are that sooner or later, you’ll end up having to face off with one of us Graphic Designers. Now, I’m not positive, but if what I’ve seen portrayed in various media outlets is any indication, we’re viewed as a sometimes frustrating, often eclectic bunch who is occasionally fun to screw with. I believe the latter part comes out of a desire for revenge against our innate nature to question, be creative and do all the other things that us designers do to apparently waste your time with.

I assure you, this is not our intent; generally speaking, we’re just trying to better understand the project you’ve put us on so that we can provide you with a better result, or make sure that what we’re creating for you is as close to what you want or envision as possible. When we pester you with questions, we’re just trying to make sure we’ve explored as many opportunities as we can to deliver the best product to you that we are able.

However, as difficult to deal with as we can apparently be (we do, after all, operate in our own bizarre wavelength), there are some things you ought to keep in mind when going into a meeting with your designer if you want to get the best results. If you stick with these basic tips, you’ll have a happy designer on your hands, and the happier a designer is, the more effective their work will be.

_1] Come to Meetings Prepared

This is particularly true of your initial meeting with a designer, but it remains important each time you sit down together. As somebody who’s spent a fair amount of time working with clients through my jobs and through freelance work, I can tell you that few things are more frustrating than a client who has minimal to no input on a project I’m doing for them. Often times, getting information out of a client regarding what they want from a project is like trying to wrench teeth from the maw of a moderately disgruntled lion. It is anything but pleasant for us, and having to poke and prod our clients for information can not only be a strain on us, but it rarely gives us anything useful.

So, what can you do? Put some thought into the project before you go into your meetings. Get as clear a picture as you can regarding what you want or what you’d like to get out of it. Be able to answer questions about the message you want to send, the voice you want to communicate in (e.g. professional, approachable, XTREEEEEME, etc.), and in the case of branding work (as is typical in the freelance realm), be ready to talk about you/your company, what it is that sets you apart and what you want the logo to say when people look at it. The more information you can provide your designer with from the get go, and the more (effectively) verbose you can be during subsequent meetings, the smoother the process will be.

_2] Don’t Say “Do Whatever You Want”

You might think you’re giving your designer “total creative freedom” (another term to avoid using with us), but in reality you’re sending us down one of two paths. The first is a directionless, hopeless meander down the path of bland, uninspired design. You won’t like what you get back, and your designer isn’t going to have fun making it for you. This inevitably leads to you creating a laundry list of things you don’t like, and your designer leaving the meeting frustrated and uninspired.

The second path is more of a super-powered rocket headed for the stars, which will cause your designer to truly run wild and do something so creative that it will be beautiful to behold, but probably nothing like what you had envisioned; this inevitably leads to you creating a laundry list of things you don’t like, and your designer leaving the meeting feeling saddened and overly-constrained.

As you can see, nobody in this situation ends up happy. How do you remedy this problem? See my first point.

_3] Keep an Open Mind

Up until now, I’ve been talking a lot about having a clear idea in your head going into meetings, and knowing what you want. These things are extremely important, but they are not to be confused with ignoring or shutting out ideas your designer has. The idea behind providing your designer with information throughout the process is to give them a framework around which to create. While we may be curious about what you have in mind with color or type choice, these are relatively easy things to figure out/discover; what we’re more interested in is the conceptual information you can provide us with. When we say we want your ideas, we mean we want to know about the insides of the project — its soul, if you will.

From there, we need some room to play. You may have some pet ideas about how you want things to look (for example, you might go into a meeting with a designer knowing you want your logo to be some kind of firey kangaroo), but I can’t stress enough how important it is not to get married to a concept early on. Your designer does do this sort of thing for a living (and hopefully is good at it), so chances are they’ll be able to come up with at least a few ideas that might not have occurred to you. And hey, you might even like some of them.

_4] Be Honest

If your designer starts throwing around terms or phrases that sound like total gibberish to you, (politely) ask them to slow down, or even to use plain english. It’s common for us to forget that not everybody speaks our bizarre demon language, so don’t be afraid to tell us you have no idea what we’re saying. Often times we’re more than happy explain in terms that normal people (read: those not touched by Design Psychosis) can understand. If for some reason your designer decides to be pretentious and not work to help you make sense of what they’re saying, then chances are you need to get yourself a new designer.

Hopefully this will have been a collection of helpful tips to get you started. As I’m sure you’re coming to find out, working with designers requires a bit of a delicate balance in many respects, but the good news is that achieving that balance isn’t as hard as it sounds. The key is flexibility on both sides of the table. While it’s easy for me to talk about steps you can take to improve your working relationship with your graphic designer, I’ve neglected to mention that it’s just as import that you find a designer that’s willing to work with you and take steps to make your life easier as well.

The overall goal here is to make the experience better for everybody involved; if anybody’s got any additional tips for improving/smoothing the interfacing process on either side of the table, feel free to throw them down in the comments.

All images in this post are from Flickr and are the ©Copyright of their original photographers