HOW TO BRIEF YOUR DESIGNER

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Graphic Designer & Branding Specialist Gio Petrucci, founder of GIOGRAFIK, shares tips for collaborating with your graphic designer.

No matter what the size of your business, you will most likely turn to a graphic designer to convey a consistent and unified look so that your customers can easily identify with you. For over a decade, I’ve had the opportunity to work with over 200 brands - each of those clients bringing a different style of communication to the table. Here I share what I’ve learned about effective communication between a client and their designer, and most importantly how to get the results you want.

The What

Start with what you need – your brand standards guide. This is a guide that will have your company’s logo, type of font you use, your colour recipes, and more. In last month’s blog, Auditing Your Brand, I provided a questionnaire to help you create this guide with your designer, to ensure that your website and all your branding elements have a consistent look and feel.

The How

I begin by reviewing your brand standards guide with you, and together we fill in any gaps. Then I create a series of mood boards, involving you in this process, which helps you figure out:

What am I looking for?
What do I need?
What do I want? Don’t want?

A picture is worth a thousand words

A mood board is the essence of what we’re trying to attain. It’s telling the story through texture, colour, contrast, light, graphics and photography. It’s a summary of the energy we’re trying to achieve with the design, delivered within a collage of images.

As we review the progression of mood boards together, be as specific as possible about which elements are really resonating with you, or not. It could be the use of colour, or texture, or the feeling that it gives you when you view it. And I realize that giving feedback is sometimes the hardest part of the process.

What I hear a lot: “I don’t like it… I don’t know why, I just don’t.” What is more helpful: “I like (these elements), but I’m concerned about (these other elements) because they (your reasons).”

Don’t feel the need to be succinct. The more information, the better:

If there’s anything that you have created previously that you don’t like, show it to me.
Feel free to send screenshots of what you’re referring to.
Bring me examples of competitors’ design elements where you feel they are doing a good job or a poor job of representing their brand.

Going through these steps ensures that we don’t miss any critical details.

The What Next

As we create your design elements, you may want to involve one or more business associates to weigh in on your design. But be careful that other people’s personal design tastes and preferences don’t move your strategy off course.

The best way to avoid this is to put together an internal team from the beginning of the design process. Build your team based on their understanding of the business space and your brand strategy, including:

Your target audience
What your competitors are doing design-wise
How you can differentiate your brand visually

This way the feedback they’re giving you is based on that knowledge, not simply on their personal preferences or biases.

We’d like to hear your thoughts!

Please join us and share your views at our next:

FREE Leadership Connect Call February 25

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Join a diverse group of mid-size business owners and myself in a FREE roundtable discussion on the topic:

“How to brief your designer”

If you have a chance to complete the branding questionnaire mentioned earlier, bring it with you. That way, if you have some specific design needs you’d like to have addressed, we can do it on this call.

And…

If you’d like to have an individual consultation with me, I’m more than happy to meet with you. We can go through the questionnaire as a starting point, and what the next steps will be after that. Let’s talk!