How Business Owners Can Help Simplify the Design Process

As a small business owner, you are naturally focused on efficiency and cost-effectiveness when you hire a professional to complete a task. Some tasks, however, take longer to complete than others simply because of the work itself. When you’re being billed hourly, it can be hard to let something complex like a logo design drag on and on. Even if you are paying a flat fee, the longer your business goes without a well-functioning logo can cost money in the long run. Here are some ways you can help your hired graphic designer to simplify and speed up the design process.

Have a clear idea of what you want the design to achieve

Are you looking to grab potential customers eye with an attractive flier to increase awareness of your company, or increase sales directly by including coupons on that flier? Do you want your business to exude corporate professionalism with a simple, elegant text-based logo, or instead present a symbol or icon to be associated with your brand without any context like the famous McDonald’s golden arches? Say you are opening a new senior care center–when your designer creates your business cards, should they be aimed at the seniors who will be living there, or instead the current caretakers of those seniors?

Having a clear idea of what you want to achieve and communicating that to your designer will help clarify the setup and help reduce the painstaking back-and-forth of design revisions.

Are you trying to generate a completely new design or revise an existing one? 

This is a big one–in the internet age, it can be overwhelming for a designer to scan for what designs your competition is using. Let your designer know right off the bat if they have free reign to create something totally unique, or if there is a particular style you want to emulate. I typically tell my logo customers to find 3 logos they love and send them to me. This helps me get an idea of the style they prefer, in some cases the color schemes, and saves a lot of the guesswork that can come with providing a subjective service. It also enables me to redirect the business owner if their chosen style is completely off-kilter for their business goals.

If you have a storefront, a website, or anything already in existence, invite your designer to visit.

You can talk to your designer all day about your company’s services, goals, culture, and more, but until they’ve visited that storefront or website themselves, their vision is limited. For the same reason many famous novelists visit the locations of their stories before writing them, being able to experience your business environment first hand can help answer a LOT of questions and save time.

Have additional suggestions for business owners? Comment below!