What Your Designer Wants You to Know
The design community is a hotpot of personalities. Some designers are incredibly outgoing and get SO WELL with their clients, and it's fantastic to see. Some of us, though, are quite the opposite. That does not mean we're mean or anything. We are just quiet and don't know how to convey our thoughts to our clients in a partial fear and partial doubt mindset.
1: There is no such thing as too many references. Sometimes we don't get many photo references or helpful details as to what a client wants. This sometimes leads to the designer and the client being in two different mindsets when creating the design.
2: The more information we have about your company, the more we understand what you need from the design. Creating a pretty design is not always the goal or what's required. This ties into the first point; there is never too much information regarding the project in question. Talking about the company's history and what the goals are, especially with the brand style, can be very helpful in creating a design that not only is aesthetically pleasing but also talks about your brand's history or how it's moving forward and evolving.
3: Less is more. A crowded design is best said NO ONE ever. We just talked about how helpful an abundance of information is greatly appreciated. Now what we're going to do is swift through what we know, what the client expects, what the client needs, what we can provide, and where we can meet in the middle. A crowded design can do more harm than good,
4: Sometimes, what you have in mind doesn't work out on paper as you thought it would. As a client, you may want everything to be just the way you pictured it in your mind, and I'm not trying to bust your bubble. But, just how we can fly in our mind and create masterful pieces of art without breaking a sweat, sometimes our minds make us believe something or everything goes well together when in the real world, it doesn't. If your designer brings up something with the insight that it may not work, please try to understand. When you do something for a living, you get to see many things, and you develop what we call "the eye," where you can just tell it won't work as the client expects. If you do want to go ahead, even when your designer advises otherwise, I would personally ask if it's possible to do a rough version of it and the one they think will work best.
5: Keep an open mind. There's nothing more exciting to a designer when the client is open to suggestions and is excited to see what our creative mind can do. More often than not, we don't get much creative freedom, the client has specific boundaries, and we understand entirely, and we're happy to get these projects as well. There's just a little umf we get when a client comes to us with an open mind; it's like a kid at a candy shop!
