WORKING WITH DESIGNERS
Who needs inspirational quotes when you have physics‽
Right now our house is posted with neon burst-cut flash cards each with a formula that needs to be rote learned. My daughter is taking her GCSEs.
I have found these interestingly inspirational. And got me thinking about how I work with my clients, and how different a project can be.
Speed vs. velocity
They are different. Speed is the distance travelled over time. I can run around with a lot of speed but get nowhere. Velocity measures displacement. It’s direction-aware. It’s focused.
A great project outcome needs focus, it needs a brief. It needs velocity. Are you hiring a designer to realise your vision, or to work with you to create something bigger than both of you?
When writing a creative brief:
- Do you know what you want? If you do, brief well, and say that’s exactly what you want, this font, that picture. We’ll make it work
- Do you sort of know what you want? Bring examples ‘I like this’, ‘I like that’, I want it like this’. We’ll make it work.
- You don’t quite know how to talk about design, but know your company, your clients and customers, and know that you want to make them to see how you’ve changed, and how you want them to feel, or that you want them to do this, or that… We’ll make it work.
- You don’t know what you want, but love what I’ve done for other people. You trust me to get on with it, and to come back when I’ve got something to show you. We’ll get there eventually.
None of these are wrong, but they do impact on fees when working with a designer (or anyone!) – rising from 1-4.
A related aside… I worked on a lovely project called ‘Cambridge Momentum‘, logo design and brochure.
Don’t take my word for it, these four points are based on a post by Seth Godin working with a designer.
That funny symbol ‽ is an interrobang – a mash up of ? & ! …‽