5 Questions You Should Always Ask Your Graphic Designer

An eye for detail and exacting results – these are fair expectations for a relationship with your designer. Whether you run a restaurant, deliver professional services, or sell products at your local market, the need is the same: such traits are the bare minimum for getting what you want out of a creative team.

Other queries, however, will swirl around your project. To ensure you get the best possible results from your design and print, here are some questions you should ask your graphic designer…

1. “What do you specialise in?”

Graphic pursuits can stand for so much variable talent. Your designer may be a dab hand at photography, able to shirk stock photos, or perhaps they’re skilled at illustration, drawing quirky line-work on your physical branding. Indigo can boast a print-first specialisation: that means we always pay due thought to how the real, material extensions of our tasks will look i.e. stationery, printed clothing, business cards and the like.

2. “Can you give me a couple of prototypes?”

People very rarely land on their top ideas right away. Often, it’s worth kicking back and mulling over different strategies. Despite our talent, there’s no merit in having an ego – it actually limits our sense of what’s possible, since we aren’t stretching ourselves. Ask your designer if they can provide several ideas before they jump feet-first into the brief you’ve given them. Three or four is enough; they should be eager for your feedback, and willing to sacrifice their favourite approach for whichever you prefer.

3. “How would you respond to a tight deadline?”

Creativity is all well and good, but it’s not the only measure of worth. Business has many concerns that eclipse slow, passionate tinkering on an edit… A service therefore must respond quickly to a last-minute task, supposing your own plans are prone to change. Obviously, it’s preferable to keep to the timeframe you both agree upon. Yet once the designer’s reliability is established, you might trust them to meet a super-fast turnaround schedule.

4. “How can you support my wider marketing strategy?”

For one-off projects, a simple brief may be enough. But hiring a long-term designer necessitates a deeper acknowledgement of how your brand functions, and how you want to market yourself. The finished work should drink in the realities of how it’ll be used within your grander promotional activity. Targeted methods are going to add value to the product. Soon enough, you’ll achieve better results, and the designer themself will uncover more of your goals, strengthening their future performance.

5. “Why have other clients responded well to you?”

The clincher for an appealing design agency is often how well they can recall their past projects, and what people said about them. So quiz your prospective partner on their greatest hits. If they can reel off names in an instant, with real, verifiable feedback to share, then they clearly are proud of their back catalogue, energised enough to know where they succeeded.

There’s a bunch of others on our tongue, but you’ll have to reach out to the Indigo team first, and field your own questions about our work! Take our graphic design skills on for your upcoming project. We’ve already asked ourselves the tough stuff, so you know you’re getting the best in quality and artisanship…