Evaluating Graphic Designers......
What You Need to Know!

The Orlando Sentinel, a household name...well, at least in Orlando households, has a site in which the art of graphic design is thus impressively described!

"Graphic designers are professionals skilled in the visual and functional enhancement of materials used in mass communication...Their specialised training in the visual medium is invaluable in deciding the most effective way to put ideas, text, and images together to inform or persuade an audience."

Well, when you put it like that, of course, it's no wonder that so many of us affect an air of great gravitas between blushes. Mostly though, what we do is to create print pieces, packaging, web pages, displays, business stationery, logos, advertisements and lots more. In fact, just about anything that needs to be professionally designed. And in Artefact, while we take our clients' work very seriously indeed, we try not to take ourselves too seriously.

What makes one supplier better than another? What should you look out for? What are the key questions? Why are you still reading questions when you've clicked in here for answers? Let's remedy that immediately.

1.Understand Your Project

First, be clear about what you need. The clearer you are about your desired style, your budget, and your timeframe the better positioned you are to ask the questions that will help you determine which supplier has the necessary qualities to meet your needs. If you are planning a brochure, for example, ask yourself if you will also need an online version. Some designers have no web experience so, if you don't find one who has, then you'll end up going to a second design house for the web end of the project and effectively starting all over again. If you want the designer to manage the printing of the job, make sure you select one who is experienced in print management. Nothing is more soul destroying than to go through all the hoops necessary to get your product beautiful on the proofs only to find that what comes back from the printers is a mess. And it happens all the time where professional collaboration between designer and printer is not in place.

2. Flexibility

Many graphic designers have an artistic streak, which in part is what you're buying. Creativity is what you need and also a designer that you can collaborate with, a designer with the confidence to contribute his/her own ideas and to add real value while also listening to and accommodating your own ideas as a customer.

3. Direct Access

Many design houses try hard not to let the customers anywhere near the designers. They are afraid that relationships may form which will result in 'nixers' , or that the designer may leave and take the client with him or her. But you need that access. You need to get over the Chinese Whispers effect of your brief passing through account executives and art directors (all of whom you are paying for) to the designers that actually do the work. At Artefact, we are prepared to take our chances and welcome our clients to deal directly with our designers. Come into the studio if you like, try out a few ideas, and work with the designer until the job is exactly as you want it.

4. Good Communication Skills

Achieving powerful communication through visual impact is a good part of what commercial graphic design is about. However, it is also essential that the end product uses words effectively and professionally. For example, if you require a print advertisement to be produced, you need a clever blending of headline, body copy and images. This we can do!

A design firm which also has specialists in bright ideas (creatives!), people who can write pithy copy (copywriters and pith artists), and people who can book an ad in the papers and get back 15% of what you pay as commission (media buyers) is known as an advertising agency! Talk to us instead.

5. Contract and Pricing

Find a design firm that will be upfront about costs, will give you a firm quotation and commit to sticking to it provided the goalposts don't change during the course of a job. Goalposts do change a lot in this business. More often than not, a job grows as it progresses. Clients decide to add extra information and pages to a brochure, or additional size versions to a piece of packaging, or some extra sections to a website. That's no problem and a flexible designer understands that it is quite natural for projects to evolve in this way. However, the designer should tell you if the alterations you require will mean a material difference to the amount of work involved and, if it means additional cost, the amount of that cost should be specified and agreed. You need a designer who will deliver pleasant surprises, not nasty shocks!

6. Check out the Portfolio

You'll typically only see a small proportion of a design firm's portfolio on their website (and this site is no exception!). The limitations of screen resolution mean that you get only a pale imitation of the real thing online. Ask your prospective design firm to call in and give you a comprehensive tour of its portfolio. Why not do it now! Click Here . You need to see a good, balanced portfolio. Lots of creativity across a range of design items. You also need to see the quality of the companies that are using this design firm. If you see some household names in the portfolio, it's obviously a very good sign. Do all of the materials look the same? Although each designer has a particular style, each client is different and of course the materials need to reflect the client more than the designer. Do you see samples of projects like the one you have in mind in the portfolio? If they've never done anything like it, they may not be such a good bet.

7. Relationship

You need to deal with easy people, in the nicest sense of the word! A design project typically involves a lot of communication between you and your designer, so you need to be able to deal with people who are easy to talk to, easy to do business with, who welcome your ideas and try hard to please you. You don't want to deal with 'professionals skilled in the visual and functional enhancement of materials used in mass communications!' That's just a recipe for same work, higher price. Wil or Rory or another member in the team will do fine, and when you see the final result, you'll say to yourself 'Wow, their specialised training in the visual medium was invaluable in deciding the most effective way to put ideas, text, and images together to inform or persuade an audience!'