If you’ve got what it takes to join the graphic design marathon, then it is a great challenge and opportunity for you to start and eventually establish a freelance graphic design business. As a freelance graphic designer, you can work in various physical environments and conditions.

You can work as part of an in-house team of designers, or as a member of a creative design agency, or the most famous, as self-employed graphic design specialist.

Being self-employed and self-starter graphic designer is basically the most prominent path which many designers opt to take. This is simply because this option will allow the designers to gain a more creative control of their work and time. As freelancers, they receive appropriate and proper recognition for their respective creative works. Besides, they also have the full freedom to concentrate on their design projects that they prefer to work on.

However, founding a freelance graphic design business is also risky, daunting and at the same time, challenging. Despite all the risks and overwhelming challenges, being a freelancer could surely be a good start. This article aims to give a birds-eye view of freelancing business in graphic design and how to overcome obstacles to attain success.

Gearing up the skills

Graphic and web design is a tough and highly competitive industry. With the advent of new creative design technologies, graphic designers should continue to learn or be left behind making themselves obsolete. Thus, with today’s design challenges, designers can stay afloat and competitive if they are knowledgeable and even experts on the following design tools.

Image by shutterstock

Graphic and Web Design Tools:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Flash
• Adobe Dreamweaver
• Corel Draw
• HTML
• CSS

For comprehensive article regarding these design tools that all graphic and web designers should learn and master, you can read it in the article Significant skills that every web designer should know.

Equipped with the required knowledge and expertise of these design software and web technology, you are now ready for the freelance design business.

Setting up the plans

Planning is a vital part of every endeavor. It is said, “If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail”. This is definitely true when it comes to setting up and eventually establishing a freelance graphic design business.

The major parts in the establishment or the set-up process are crucial. They are often referred to as the core foundation of the entire business cycle. In most freelance business ventures, the major preliminary procedures include conception of the following concepts and ideas.

Products vs. Services

In the realm of business, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish a product from a service. As a result, some businesses offer a product which primarily appears as a “service”, and vice versa. This some cloud of confusion is also true in the freelance graphic design business.

However, there is a thin line of difference between products and services: concreteness.

A product is something tangible and concrete that is given to clients or customers in exchange of their payment. It is presumed to satisfy the needs and requirements of its buyer. On the other hand, a service is something intangible and abstract that clients and customers purchase in order to satisfy their needs or requirements.

Products to offer

Businesses are basically established to offer products to clients or consumers. A freelance graphic design business has a similar approach. The designer desires to offer creative products while enjoying the creative design process and at the same time satisfying the clients’ graphic design needs.

At first, in the design industry, it seems difficult to conceptualize what products to offer. However, creativity knows no limit. So the following are the probable creative products that a freelance graphic design business offers:

• Website design. Creating the basic structure and elements of a personal and corporate website; websites can be grouped as either static HTML pages or dynamic database-driven sites.
• Website redesign. Giving a creative touch and enhancing a website’s look-and-feel; a site overhaul affecting one or all major design sets.
• Web template design. Building a website blueprint and template which will serve as pattern for design and redesign; provides a total flexibility for clients in managing the site’s graphical layout.
• Logo design. Conceptualizing the corporate emblem that will fully represent a company or organization in all media; usually in vector layout to facilitate image resizing.
• Banner/header design. Creating sleek and elegant banners for advertising campaigns or headers for corporate websites; should meet clients’ creative and artistic requirements.
• Print designs. Creating professional design layout for printing purposes; includes brochure design, letterheads, manuals, flyers, and many others.
• Flash animations. Building non-obtrusive, elegant, and professional Flash animations for websites, presentations, and web campaigns; should meet clients’ creative and technical requirements.
• Copyrighted graphic downloads. Creating superb, portable, and professional collections of graphic artworks, vector illustrations, and other graphic designs for paid download; should observe copyright laws and terms or use.
• Image enhancements. Using graphic software tools in beautifying and visually enhancing images for clients’ use; could be in the form of photo retouching and resizing for product gallery other usages.

Services to offer

In the design industry, a freelance graphic designer has various services to offer depending on his or her skill set. The following are the probable services that can be offered both online and locally:

• Cost Estimate. This is usually offered for free where the designer gives an estimate for the creative design requirement of clients. The estimate usually contains details of the creative workflow from start to finish.
• Website Setup. This service covers the technicality of preparing a web server in a remote web hosting company in order to setup the client’s website.

Product and service limitations

Human imagination is boundless but a creative design project should be bounded by some foreseen limitations. This is to ensure that the client’s project is properly defined from the smallest of specifications up to the most technical aspect of the design. This is basically done through entering into a service contract or agreement with the client defining all the necessary tasks and procedures that a designer should undergo and the corresponding tasks that the client must take.

With the help of these product and service limitations, clients cannot ask for anything outside of the predefined “scope of creative work” thus ensuring a better understanding about the project and a timely completion brought about by a focused work.

Short-term plans

It is but normal to businesses to develop plans of various ranges: short terms and long terms. For a budding graphic design business, there is much of the focus into short term tasks to position the business into the right track in the industry.

Image by shutterstock

Among the useful plans of actions in a short term range includes:

• Branding. Choosing the right and fit name for the company, for the products and services to offer, and the slogan representing the entire business endeavor; requires uniqueness and creativity to capture everyone’s attention with greater retention factor.
• Being visible. This precisely covers the Contact Us and About Us pages in a website. Driven with the desire to grow the business, freelance designers should surface and agree to provide their reliable, visible, and physical contact information.
• Acquiring materials. A graphic design business requires tools and technology to produce creative works for the clients. Among the required materials are desktop computers with a chosen Operating System, graphic software, printers, scanner, drawing devices like tablets, and a lot more depending on the startup capital for the procurement of the said materials.
• Staffing. Requires additional manpower? A freelance business does not necessarily mean a one-man business. Placing competent artists and partners undoubtedly puts the business into a winning edge.
• Launching. If highly established businesses need to launch their products for public awareness, a freelance graphic design business definitely need to launch the business and its ideas to formally educate and inform the community about its existence. The launch could be done formally or virtually especially for online-based businesses.

Long-term plans

These plans involve tasks, activities and events that would affect the good of the company in a gradual and consistent manner. Thus, the desired effects are not seen overnight. These are the common long term plans for a freelance business:

• Better location. Though time and good business dealings, it is quite attainable to acquire a better and elegant location to do business.
• Popular name. Through exhibiting prowess in the creative design industry, your freelance business would then turn into a widely known name and trusted brand.
• Focused Workforce. Through business developments, a design company can assign creative works among dedicated and fully focused artists or designers to produce excellent results.
• Expansions. A real measure for business success is expansion: multiplying the number of employees, assets, locations, and client base.

Marketing plans

One major factor for the success of any business is marketing. In today’s business trends, there are several marketing methods that freelance design business can consider.

Image by shutterstock

• Words of mouth. The oldest form of advertising but with a limited business impact; includes common selling skills to sell the business ideas.
• Print Ads. Also one of the oldest advertising method with minimal cost but of reasonably greater reach; has a better retention and infestation factor due to print ads’ posterity.
• Online campaigns. Various advertising networks are effective in bringing unique clients for businesses with online presence; cost-effective campaigns since millions of probable clients can be reached with just a single campaign.
• Social networks. A free and viral method in propagating the information about your business; with the existence of various free social networks, disseminating information is easy and effective.

Prospecting clients

Getting clients for the business is a major marketing goal. However, with the use of various tools and technology, prospecting can be effectively done with the use of categories.

For a freelance graphic design business, products and services can be offered to clients in the following hierarchical categories:

1. Personal
   1. Profit
   2. Non-profit
   3. Business (based on industry, or in any other category that you may prefer)
      1. Private Sector
         1. i.      Healthcare
         2. ii.      Foods and Dining
         3. iii.      Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
         4. iv.      Education
         5. v.      Manufacturing
         6. vi.      and many others
   4. Government Sector

Setting up a “corporate” site

One of the most important factor for a freelance graphic design business is its website. Its site should be elegant, sleek, functional, and beautiful as much as they try to offer beautiful creative works to their clientele.

A visually appealing website could speak for the business more compared to the advertising campaigns that the company would create. Thus, the site should be well thought-of, well-built, trendy, and functionality-equipped. Besides, the site should be optimized for search engines, thus should have original and well written and presented contents.

The best choice for a designers’ website is a database-driven content management systems (CMS) which provides ease of management and administration of users and contents. Excellent choice for CMS includes WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

Setting up a portfolio

A freelance graphic design business should be backed up with a number of superb design portfolios. This portfolio should showcase only the best among your creative works to effectively entice web visitors to buy the showcased creative design package like a website or any related artworks.

Image by shutterstock

As a rule, this portfolio should be readily available in the company’s website. Every portfolio entry should be given a well written project description to detail the scope of the design tasks and the client’s feedback about the end-product.

Common benefits and problems

Many opt to become a freelance graphic designer because of the various benefits that they may have in mind. Among these benefits includes self-management, self-motivation, passion for creative work, and a full control of one’s time and focus.

As a freelancer, you are a self-starter businessperson. As such, you are the boss and the employee all at the same time. However, given this whole flexibility, the burden of all the tasks like sales and marketing, business processes like invoicing and tax filing, and working with clients’ creative design requirements will all be laid at your shoulders.

Moving towards success

Despite the hardships that are sure to come as a freelancer, success is always at the hands of those who are persistent, diligent, and talented in the field of creative works. Advertising and marketing will definitely become easy if you have a wonderful portfolio to back you up. Loads of work will be lighten up when you have the financial capability to hire qualified designers to help you in most of the design projects giving you time to manage and grow your business.

Everything in a freelance designer’s life is a challenge. But equipped with the design skills and the core of business basics, raising a freelance design business into a widely accepted and well-known creative design provider in the world is now a reachable goal and inspiration.

Minimal wallpapers refer to desktop wallpapers with a simple design that includes a limited number of objects, lines, designs and colors. Many people like the designs because of their simplicity.

Unlike complex wallpapers, minimal desktop wallpapers meet the usability of the computer user that uses the desktop as a place to save temporary files and recent email attachments. Minimal designs fits well because they are simple and allow the user to clearly see the desktop content without the distraction of a complex design.

Thus, here is a collection of 75 designs of minimal wallpapers with different screen resolutions, you can click on the image to visit the original source site and download the wallpapers.

\

People tend to associate Flash content with two things: video and games. But it’s far from being right, as Flash has a great potential and provides a bunch of opportunities to create appealing portfolios, commercial and promotional websites, complex corporate applications, educational websites and even online stores. But there is the other side of the coin, which deals with the Flash website management.

Before continuing reading this post did you already join our Twitter and subscribe to our RSS feed? If not, rush and join us now to receive updates of new posts and free resources.

Working with flash, exporting the SWF, uploading it to the server, testing it, and repeating every-time you change any little thing is very time consuming and frustrating at times. But all these problems disappear if you are working with FlashMoto Flash CMS.

FlashMoto is an advanced Flash content management system that allows Flash developers to develop interactive, media-rich websites and then easily update or enhance them. The end users may take advantage of the ready-made Flash CMS templates, which are already equipped with all necessary modules, slots and tools.

Below is the collection of stunning Flash websites based on FlashMoto CMS. Just take a look at the designs, their implementation and functionality. You will be definitely excited with the opportunities provided by this CMS for Flash.

FlashMoto based portfolios and design studio websites

FlashMoto Flash content management system is in the great demand among photographers, artists, designers and even musicians who are looking for creative interesting ways of presenting their works online. And there is more to it than meets the eye, as FlashMoto is famous for its modern quality Flash galleries, which can be easily edited through the convenient control panel. You simply need to upload images, sort them according to the albums (if there are any), and provide descriptions for them and that’s it! You have a finished fully-functional gallery with stunning animation effects that can also be customized with no coding required.

Below are some of Flash Moto CMS based portfolios, design studio websites and personal websites that are worth visiting:

Honeysbeautylounge.com

The website of a professional Makeup Artist based in TORONTO, Canada.

Bruno-Birkhofer.ch

Bruno Birkhofer Photography

Funnypaper.biz

Established in 2007, Funny Paper is a company of young designers with the motto: “A world made of paper”.

PetraSmolenakova.com

This is a portfolio of Petra Smolenakova, an artist from the Czech Republic. Amazingly, her very first work was on desplay at the Museum of Art in Prague.

DanielKwasniewski.pl

Portfolio of Daniel Kwasniewski, a photographer from Poland.

Glashionista.com

Fashion Photography.

StolkFotografie.nl

The portfolio of Bram Stolk, a photographer from the Netherlands.

NassimGhawidelasgari.com

Personal website of Nassim Ghawidel-Asgari. Nassim has worked in the fashion industry for many years. Her influences draw from experiences travelling the world in pursuit of a pure expression of style and elegance.

FernandoChavez.com.mx

The portfolio of Fernando Chavez, a creative photographer from Mexico.

Studio-fg.ru

The website of Creative Floristic studio.

Rusinov.com

The website of a Russian racing driver, Roman Rusinov.

Business FlashMoto based Websites

The main requirements of the business Flash websites are: clean, well-designed page layouts; good navigation design; clean optimized photos and graphics; the availability of the contact form, pop-up windows and other convenient extras. And all this is provided by Flash Moto CMS as well. One of its nice features is the ‘modules’ that are prebuilt to allow you to easily add video, music, navigation, and even Photo galleries, which will definitely save you some time and frustration since you don’t have to do it from scratch in flash.

Echallan.net

The calm color scheme, the absence of cluttered forms and complex navigation, extreme simplicity and lightness – that’s all about this Flash design that belongs to Purple Purple Infotech Ltd. The balls perform the menu function and look so creative.

Malorca-Flow.com

The website belongs to Malorca Flow, a production company for photoshoots, promotional and commercial photography.

WintechSolution.com

The website presents Juliana Hotel Phnom Penh that has been serving people coming from all around the world.

PixelConcierge.co.uk

This is a website of PixelConcierge, a web development company that provides web design services, logo design, etc.

Elite-Dream.simaer.com

The website belongs to Elite Dreams, a company that provides travels and hosting solutions.

UrbanSmart.net

Provocate.com.au

Brand/eCommerce FlashMoto CMS based websites

Brand and eCommerce websites deserve special attention. Such websites requires a lot of aspects to be taken into consideration, among which are: the ease of use, the creativity, and of course, a professional look. And a lot of Flash developers managed to reach these goals using the FlashMoto Flash CMS. Once you log in to the FlashMoto control panel, you will be surprised with the user interface, which is fairly simple and straightforward. Everything is clearly labeled, and easily changeable! Just take a look at some amazing skillfully done websites powered up by the Flash CMS.

J-b-Nielsen.de

InsightOpticians.co.uk

Established for over 25 years, Insight Opticians prides itself as a trusted and friendly eye-care and eye-wear service.

Silver-Badge.com

Silver Badge is the exclusive importer and distributor of luxury brand products, hand made from design to production.

Grupobeltor.com

The website of a Mexican Shoe company.

Music websites powered up by FlashMoto

Music websites based on Flash Moto CMS are characterized by dynamism and extreme interactivity. They are accompanied by a pleasant music, which can be customized to your taste or turned off at all. This CMS for Flash also provides an advanced Music player with a playlist.

Finmusic.co.uk

UK music distribution for independent artists.

Ahndray.com

The personal website of a talented Mexican singer – Ahndray.

Social websites are the latest advancement in the field of technology. It helps people to form small groups and communicate within that group. This group can be friends, families, colleagues or simply people who share a similar interest. These websites facilitate an online community of users who use it as a forum to discuss topics of common interest.

Social sites helps you to do a whole lot of things than just communicate with others. You can use these sites to promote your business as well. These sites can be used as a means to popularize your business and spread more awareness about your products or services to people around the world.

There are numerous advantages in using social sites to promote your blogs. Firstly, you can reach out to a wider audience without any kind of physical boundaries. You can make use of the huge number of these social site users to advertise your product. The second and most important advantage is that you will promote your blog to the right audience. When you see social sites, you can find your target audience easily and this will help you to reach out to the people who have the highest potential to convert your advertisement into a profitable stream of revenue. Also, this audience will be in a position to better appreciate your efforts and give you the credit and acknowledge that you deserve.

Other than these factors, it gives you a much better chance of finding collaborators for your business. These joint working partnerships can prove to be mutually beneficial to both the parties concerned.  It will also give you a chance to know what the latest trends and you can make the required changes to your business to meet the changing business environment.

Social sites give you an opportunity to start from scratch and build a global business. You can advertise, recruit, manage and work on just about every facet of your business through these social media sites. This also brings down the cost of your marketing and advertising to a considerable extent and all these factors contribute to the success of your business.

Social News Sites

Social news sites are a category of social sites that helps users to submit news stories and website links with the idea of sharing it with others. They can also vote on the news stories to express their likes, dislikes and preferences. These votes help to provide more visibility to any news story. Besides content-based stories, users can also submit pictures, audio or videos. In a nutshell, the users get to decide what news stories can appear in the site. Every user has equal editorial rights in the site.

So, how does it work? Social news sites use an algorithm that take into account many factors such as the relationship of the user to the news story, the discussions and frenzy surrounding the story and the number of votes that it has received to determine the rank and popularity of every news story. It also employs human editors to monitor the content and ensure that adult or malicious content is not posted to the site. They also have programs and algorithms that prevent any user from manipulating these sites to one’s gain.

As a user, one can submit an article or web page directly from the web page to the social news sites by means of icons or links put in place by the owner of the web page. This makes it easy for users to submit content without having to copy the URL of the web page and then pasting it on the site.

In this example, an article in a design blog can be submitted directly to news sites by means of the icons present on the left hand side. This makes it easy for the users to share interesting and informative links easily.

Popular Social News Sites

Some popular social news sites are discussed below:

Reddit:

Reddit is a popular social news site that has a large number of users. It has news on almost every topic that you can think of. For better readability and ease of navigation, the topics have been categorized into health, politics, science and business and each of these categories are called subreddites. The reader can vote up or down using the arrows present on the left hand side of each news snippet and he or she can also write comments for each story.

Digg:

Digg is probably the most popular social news site on the Internet today. It covers a wide range of topics and it even has a separate section for video and images. Users can vote, comment or even have discussions on each link that is posted. They have numerous widgets and buttons that will make it easy for you to integrate it into your website. The popularity of this news site makes it a great tool to generate more traffic to your website. When more users vote or comment on your news story, you have a higher chance of bringing in more traffic to your blog.

StumbleUpon:

This is a great news site to increase traffic to your website over a period of time. It has good potential to maximize brand exposure and reach out to the right audience. It is not an authentic news site, but a combination of social networking and social news site. With this site, you can tag your interests and then click on the button to surf the web for news and information related to your interest. This is a better way to find the news stories that you need, rather than browse through the search engines to identify what you want. Users can also vote on each of these related news stories. One advantage is that the Stumbleupon icon can be installed in the toolbar of the browser and all that the user has to do when he or she comes across an interesting page is to click on the icon in the toolbar. This way, users can share information even from websites that do not have a widget or button.

Slashdot:

Slashdot is primarily intended for tech news and it was probably one of the first social news site that appeared on the Internet. It provides the latest information on any piece of gadget or any technology-related news. It is a one-stop place for the needs of all nerds.

DesignBump:

DesignBump is a social news site that is related to design. It is a great site for anyone who has passion in designing or is a designer himself or herself. This site helps one to keep abreast of the latest trends in the design world.

DesignFloat:

DesignFloat is another popular social news site for designers. They have numerous categories like graphic design, web design, interactive design, industrial design, digital art, photography, motion graphics and even tutorials. One can find interesting posts and articles submitted by like-minded users on this news site.

From these examples, we can differentiate social news sites into two categories. The first category caters to a wider audience and it includes just about any topic while the second category caters to a specific audience that have interest in a certain topic. An example of the first category is Digg or Reddit while an example of the second category is Slashdot or DesignBump or DesignFloat. You can choose the news site that you want depending on your interests.

How can you promote blogs through social news sites?

There are many avenues to promote blogs on social news sites. Its a good idea to use a combination of these methods to popularize your blog and to generate more traffic to your site. The first way is to advertise in these social news sites to reach out to targeted audience. Its better to look for social news sites that cater to a small group of niche audience. For example, if you have a tech-based business, then you can advertise in slashdot or similar news sites that are visited by people who share a common interest in tech-related news and information.

You can use widgets and buttons given by the different social news sites in your web page. This will make it easier for users to submit the link to the news site of their choice. When more number of users submit your link to more news sites, the possibility for traffic increases substantially. It can even give a boost to the search engine rank of your page because more people have visited your site. Your traffic will also increase when more users vote or comment on your link.

However, while doing this ensure that you do not try to manipulate the social news sites. They have many advanced algorithms that can detect this trend and it can backfire. Though your web traffic can also increase when numerous people like your news story or comment on it, you also have to watch out for an unscrupulous method of traffic generation. So, use it wisely and cautiously to generate more traffic to your site.

Conclusion

In short, social news sites are a great means to promote your website and increase the traffic. There are numerous social news sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon that can help you to popularize your business. However, you have to ensure that you do not resort to manipulative and artificial techniques to achieve this purpose. It should be genuine and realistic for a long-lasting effort.

The first email or phone call you receive to notify you of a project is also the first indirect contact between you and the client. This initial step includes basic information about the project that you may need to know to continue the conversation with the client and start the project consequently or simply decline with a gentle apology.

The input you receive from the client is the most important piece of information you depend on to create a design that meets with their requirements. Clever designers don’t just take what the client tells them and gets started; instead he or she should seek what is behind the product information or the content that will need to be added to the project.  To gain a bigger picture of the project, you should learn how to understand the client and what is behind their words and expressions. In most cases, clients do not have experience in the design business so the project owner will struggle to express what he or she really needs such as using specific style or colors and in many cases the customer does not know the best solution for the design, this will require you to provide advice and options to serve the project marketing and end users needs.

Since collecting data is the first step in the design process, it is important to gather every necessary piece of information regarding the project before you put your designs on paper. This initial meeting with the customer can decide if the project will flow smoothly with less time and budget waste in doing major modifications as well as a lot of comments, especially when it is the first time dealing with the client.

Designing like a marketing person

Image by shutterstock

At this early stage in the project, you jump from your main career area to the marketing side and play the role of the marketing person for the project. Even if the company is too large and prevents you from meeting with the client directly, it would be an initial meeting where you meet with the project manager, marketing manager or a person who has direct contact with the customer.

While your design plays an important role in the products marketing, it is important to be involved in the marketing process and to make sure that your design won’t stand as a hard rock in the face of success of the project and meet with its requirements. At this point, you are acting like a marketing person who determines the creative direction for the design that will meet with the projects market.

In the first meeting with the client, it is important to listen to the client, what are the ideas running through his or her head before starting to steer the conversation to get more information.

Although this is not a real design step as you’re still getting the information, I would consider it a part of the design because it’s important for putting the design together. You have to meet the client with two faces, you approach the client with the marketing face that would like to convince the client to follow specific design styles or get a better idea as to whether the client has one in mind and how he envisions it.

In many cases, the client may spoil the creative idea because of their lack of design skills and creative vision. While the design may flow just perfectly, some suggestions or ideas can flip the design to become an ugly experience instead of a creative one. This happens mostly when the client is new and does not depend entirely on the designer’s vision.

Reading your client

While understanding your client is a matter of time and experience, you can read what is behind the client’s words and understand what is required, even if he or she did not know how to express these needs in the designer’s language.

Reading your client involves many issues such as listening carefully to the project requirements and the ideas and thoughts, learning from the client’s information and the background you have such as the business type, scale, previous artwork done for the business and the customer as well. In addition to this data, you will get more information by simply asking the contact person questions to educate your talent and start thinking of ideas for the project.

Questions you should ask

Image by shutterstock

There are some questions that you should ask the project owner or manager about the design expectations and requirements. These questions depend on the project type, end-user, output and the client.

The following examples show some information you may ask about to get a better idea about the project:

• The company logo, color scheme, design style on the website, corporate identity, and if the client wants to follow it or change the colors and the design style from the existing one.
• The type of business and how to choose the design style that meets with the business field
• The project output. Will the project be a website, brochure, desktop application, etc…
• If the client would like to have a similar design style to an existing one such as an existing site.
• The functions that the need to be added to the project
• The marketing concept behind the project
• The audience, this helps to create a design that meets with the audiences’ needs and becomes user friendly.

Although there are common questions that you need to ask the customer, there are other questions that are more related to the project type and change based on each project’s circumstances.

Questions you should NOT ask

While asking questions is an important step to get more information about the design process, they should be asked wisely because some questions may cause instead of a helpful meeting with precise steps to follow the design.

Unwanted questions can be similar to giving more options after setting one of the topics such as color examples after determining the color scheme of the design. On the other hand, some questions may get the customer involved more than usual in the design process, this ends up with either a conflict between the designer and the client or ends up with a design that isn’t compatible with the creative direction of the project or the end-users’ needs.

Therefore, it is important to be careful about the questions you ask the client, it should be directed and useful in the design process.

Client feedback checklist

Image by shutterstock
One of the most important documents that you can depend on to summarize the client’s feedback about the project or even take with you to let the client fill in is the design feedback checklist.  This checklist organizes the design input and thoughts about the design and how he or she expects the design to look.  Although you can directly give it to the client to fill in, it is important to fill it in by yourself as a designer to better understand what it reflects.

The feedback checklist is also helpful to transfer the creative vision when you have a team of designers that are working on the same project; it makes sure that everyone is following the correct information with a unified style and output.

Similar to the question list, the checklist can include the following information:

• The Project type, it can be website, printing project, logo design …etc.
• The color scheme of the project.
• The target audience, they can be business people, kids or young girls …etc.
• The corporate identity and design style
• The required design style
• An example of a similar project
• Examples of the competitors designs
• The number of mock-ups and options
• The project content, text, images and video
• The functions that will be added visualized in the design
• The number of designs required for the project
• The technology that will be used in the project and its versions
• The output format and restrictions such as the image sizes for the website design.
• The project timing and delivery

How the client meeting affects the design process

Image by shutterstock

Gathering this information builds knowledge about how the design and creative process will flow based on the client type and the project requirements. For example, the client may require different design mock-ups before choosing the best fit, in this case, you will need to either create two design mock-ups or let two designers with different styles work on creating the mock-up.

Also, in some projects, the client may like to see a drafted version with only outline for how the design is constructed. However, it is important to analyze the data collected through the meeting and in the feedback checklist to determine the best design process workflow that compliments these requirements.

Conclusion

Understanding the client is the most important step in your design workflow as it determines the success of the project and prevents a lot of wasted time and money through going in wrong creative directions.  Therefore it is useful to have good skills to gather all the possible information from the client or the contact person to be able to ensure the success of the design project.  Having some marking skills such as how to negotiate with the client, asking the right questions and getting organized feedback are required to serve the creative process.

Although experience is very important in this, you can still get the most out of the client meeting through the guidelines above and using the feedback checklist.