10 Questions a Graphic Designer Should Ask You

A Graphic Designer does a layout design for a multitude of needs and purposes. Let me zoom in to the typical needs of a Marketing Head at a company. Her team will receive design requests from across the company.

Typical Design Needs of a Marketing Manager

HR needs new business cards for new recruits. The sales manager needs an invitation to the cocktail hour she is hosting at an upcoming convention. The CEO needs her White Paper formatted and aligned to the corporate style guide before publishing. Posters need to be created for the awareness campaign on the new machinery. How to visuals or videos for teaching the new machinery. Flyers for the new product launch. Banners and brochures for the booth at the next conference. The list goes on. No matter what the need the requirement is to have beautifully designed professional visuals that communicate and catch the eye of the target audience.

How does a Marketing manager get these visual assets created efficiently and on time? Knowing what is needed and pulling the information together is critical. We have compiled a checklist as a guide. This will ensure that you have all the information ready.

What Your Graphic Designer Needs to Know

1. What is it? This can be answered in one word: A Poster. Or you may want to elaborate on describing the project and its objectives. Go into as much detail as you need to. Here’s a tip: ongoing customers will refer to a previous document and mock up an improvement to the requirement. This saves time and clarifies communication.
2. Who is the audience? Your answer may be customers attending xyz conference. Employees in our processing plant. C-level executive dinner. Knowing who you are trying to reach helps us design with the audience context in mind.
3. What do you hope to accomplish? If your graphic designer knows your end goal, then he can create with you. Answering this question can be a range of things. Sometimes a customer will say, “I am attending the most important meeting of the year. We need this white paper to have phenomenal images. Pay special attention to the cover design.” Knowing your hope and desires puts the designer in your shoes, getting to feel what your concerns are.
4. What is your deadline? Specify your date, time and time zone. You might wonder, why time zone. Errors creep up in the details. More than once a customer who works on Pacific Time might suddenly be at a conference in Amsterdam and urgently needs overnight delivery of an invitation card for a customer dinner event. Your designer needs to know the time zone you are in when you say 6 AM!
5. Do you have a style guide? Do you expect strict adherence to the corporate style guide, or does this graphic design requirement allow creating outside the box? There are times when an invitation or a poster, a banner may need to communicate a certain tone or theme that breaks with corporate branding and tone. Let the designer know when he can be flexible. If you don't have a company style guide, creating one would be a good idea. Get your graphic designer to start with templates based on your logo.
6. Viewing Purpose: Is this content for print, presentation, web, mobile? Or do you need final output in multiple formats? No need to go into the details, but there is a big difference in how a designer sets up a document for print or for digital display. Knowing the format of the end product is essential for keeping color errors and files size issues causing errors in the final output.
7. What are the dimensions? Tell the exact size of the final output. Be specific. Companies are global. One department may use letter size for brochures while another may use A4. Banners, postcards, flyers, business cards – no matter how many times you have requested – spell out the dimensions.
8. What is the orientation of the displayed document? Like size, let the graphic designer know the orientation of the content. Today business cards may be horizontal or vertical. Banners can be printed both vertically for stand-up presentations or horizontally. Brochures can be created in multiple folds.
9. Images – Will you be supplying high-resolution digital images? If not, we will select stock photos and use watermark images as placeholders. We will purchase after approval. If your company uses icons in your professional documents, then send us the source files so we can place the icons in their vector format to get crisp and clear images.
10. Do you have samples to share? Lastly, there is nothing like an example. New customers can speed up the design and layout process if they have documents that they would like to use as a model. We also encourage new customers to show us samples of what they like. Visuals of what you like can range from font type to tone.

These 10 questions apply to a range of design requests like the list below:

Brochures Flyers Posters Business Cards Banners White papers Postcards

Invitation cards PowerPoint Presentations Book Layout Cover Design Email Signatures Gif Animations Interactive PDFs

If your company needs graphic design for any of the following needs, get in touch with us and tell us more about the graphic design challenges you face and we will let you know how we can help.