So you’ve finally decided it’s time to make that website you’ve always been putting off, or update your brochure or business card, now what? Well if you have a designer selected you’ll need to meet with them to make it happen. Instead of just showing up and hoping they can pull out of your head what you want there are a few things you can do in advance that will help the process start (and thus finish) faster.
One thing that I know I do, and I can imagine other designers do as well, is I tend to base the look of the website, brochure, advertisement, etc, off of the company logo. So if you have your logo make sure you’ve got it in a very high-quality version and if you’re able to get the original files from whoever created the logo for you even better. We’ve talked about the importance of a high-quality logo before, so make sure you get this for the designer – vector file if possible. If you don’t have one perhaps that should be the first step with the designer!
The next thing to make sure you bring along is examples of what you like, if you can get your hands on them. For websites it’s easy enough to find some sites online that have features that you like and make a list, it may be a bit harder to get examples for a brochure or business card. That being said, if you have examples from your rolodex or perhaps a flyer you saw when out shopping, grab it and bring it to the meeting. We’ve probably all heard of or experienced exercises where one person stands up and reads out an explanation of a drawing to make and then everyone in the room has to draw it – well you probably know that everyone in the room comes up with something different from those instructions! Same goes for design, if you do not have examples to show then your designer has to interpret your instructions and it will likely take longer to get to the final product that you like. So make sure if at all possible bring examples – and if all else fails do a basic pencil drawing on a piece of paper to outline your main ideas.
Another thing to do is have your content ready. If you’re making a website take a look at the content on your example websites you’ve got ready and see what sort of content you should be putting online, or if you have ideas of what sort of things you want to say have that ready. The more that you have ready in advance the faster it will be to piece it all together. The same goes for any brochures, advertisements or even a simple business card – having the content to start with from the get go means you can get started right away instead of it holding up the process.
If one of my clients or potential clients showed up to a meeting with all of that stuff ready it would make things so much easier! So next time you meet with your designer have those three things ready: logo, examples, and content, and you’ll have you end product that much faster!
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