Design Tips: Questions to ask your designer

Sooner or later a business grows to a point where they need a professional designer to create everything from flyers to product logos. You pay a lot of money for their services and you expect to get the most for your money, but there are a lot of traps that you can fall into because you or your designer make assumptions that will come back to bite you in the wallet. So speaking as a ‘semi-professional’ designer, what are the questions you should be asking me when you hire our services

Get the specifications spelt out in detail

This might seem an odd thing to say when you are already going to a designer with an idea. The reality is, what you want and what you tell the designer can be two different things. Also, you might find that you’re working to one standard and the designer is working to another. Case in point Business Cards. Being in New Zealand we use a card 90x55mm in size, but the US uses 85x51mm, A7 for many European countries, and so on. By getting things spelled out by you and the designer, you can ensure you are both talking about the same thing, which will save a lot of revisions in the long run.

Is it designed for screen or print?

You might think this a silly question, but you’ll be surprised how often this becomes an issue when we are printing someone’s design work. A lot of designers these days are trained for digital media, and so naturally the design looks brilliant on a screen but doesn’t look that great on a printed page. We also get stuff designed by ‘web’ companies, where the printed material is a secondary concern, and it shows. So ask your designer if they can supply print ready parts of the material and have a friendly print company like us at Copy Express to have a look at it for you to say if it is.

Who owns the finished material?

Now you would think that you are paying for their time you own the work they produce. In fact that is not the case. Most creative business have the policy unless you specify it (and pay for it)  then you don’t own the material, you have only paid for a licence to it. Legally speaking that is within their rights as many creatives will ‘discount’ their work with the understanding that they will get future income from it. So when you hire someone find out who owns what at the end of it before signing that contract.

Does the designer supply the source material?

When creating something like a flyer or brochure, a designer might buy stock images, fonts, or even templates to setup the design. Now you might get charged for these resources, you might not. Regardless, you might find you want to use it for your own in house work, so find out if you being charged for the resources, can you have them for your own use. If not you might have to ‘buy’ them from the designer or the designer can point you to where they purchased by you.

Can you get copies of the design files from the designer?

This follows on from the source materials question and related to the designs themselves. As a printer this is a reoccurring problem for us, when a client comes in with a design created by a designer who’s subsequently left the industry and now the client comes to us to update the files and all we have are lower resolution proofs to work with. In these cases we often end up having to recreate the designs from scratch so that’s additional cost to the client.  So as a customer, ask the designer if you can get copies of the design files, or at least copies of the print masters when you contract them for work.

Could you get a style guide?

A style guide is a document that contains all the needed information and files for a company look. At a minimum it may list the logo and its variations, the typefaces used, colours expressed in the different formats, standard backgrounds, and any other style or imagery that’s used for your marketing material. It might only be a few pages of a pdf, but it means that anyone can come in and design things for you and it will all have the same look. It only really applies when you are setting up new branding, and it will be an extra charge, but sooner than later you’ll end up needing it when you want to add something new and you can’t (or won’t) go back to the same designer who did the original work.

Naturally there are more questions to ask your designer but this is a good starting point. And in respect to Copy Express: We design for print first, you own the design work you paid for, we are more than happy to supply the source files on request. Style guides a separate service and we are more than happy to produce them for you too.

Want to find out how much it will cost to get something designed? Need advice on the best way to maximize every dollar you will be spending on design? Need someone to take apart and rebuild a flyer or business card? Then see us at Copy Express, we can do all of this and more.