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10 Tips for Hiring the Best Graphic Designer
10 Tips for Hiring the Best Graphic Design Firm
Are you looking to hire a graphic design firm for your website? Choosing the best one can be difficult. Follow these tips to make it easier.
Graphic design firm
Looking for the right graphic design firm can be frustrating if you don’t know a lot about the design business.
You’re likely to reach out to a few firms, who claim to possess exceptional skills and experience, and they may, but how do you select the right graphic design firm that’s the best fit for your company?
While skills are important, it’s also smart to find a team that is pleasant to work with and sees things through the lens of a marketing perspective.
This means they can find creative solutions to your marketing problems. It’s also important to make sure the firm you hire is committed to the success of your project and respects your timelines.
In this post, you’ll find ten tips to hiring the best graphic designer for your company project. Without further delay, let’s get to it.
1. Use a Creative Brief
A creative brief document takes the guesswork out of projects and helps clearly define your expectations to your design firm. It entails defining your marketing problem, your key objectives, your project specifications, deadlines and target audience.
Knowing the scope of your project should also be in the creative brief. This will also allow the design firm to give you a realistic timeline of how long it will take to complete your project.
There could be variables from the design side you may not be aware of, so communicating all the information in a creative brief will help your graphic design firm gauge a realistic deadline for your project.
This will avoid any unnecessary issues that come up that could delay your deadline.
Knowing this information prior to receiving a proposal from the graphic design firm plays an important part in helping you decide which design firm is best for your project’s needs.
2. Know What Skills Your Project Requires
Before you speak with designers, know what skills your project requires.
Do you need a web designer, a programmer, SEO or SEM professionals or writers for your content that many graphic design firms supply, or can some of the work be done in-house?
Will you need to hire an illustrator for original artwork which requires knowing certain design applications like Adobe Illustrator, Visual Studio or Creative Suite or do you want to save money by using stock images?
Do you need a professional with video producing skills to shoot quality videos for your website? Knowing this information up front will help your graphic design firm quote you a realistic price for your project.
3. Look Beyond a Graphic Designer’s Portfolio Samples
Seeing graphic designer portfolios aren’t enough to choose a designer for your project. Ask potential firms how they came up with the solutions they executed for their clients.
This will give you a better idea of how the team generates creative solutions and also give you the opportunity to integrate your ideas into your project.
4. Learn How a Graphic Design Firm Thinks on the Fly
Hitting your interviewees with questions during the interview process will help you know how the firm thinks on their feet.
Ask them to critique your current website or a competitor’s designs and have them explain to you how they can improve the design.
This will help you understand their creative process and how they find solutions to design problems on the fly.
5. Start With a Small Trial Paid Project
A smart way to narrow down your candidates is to present them with a small paid sample project to complete.
Have them design a logo, a header for your website or a navigation button. This will demonstrate the talent of the candidates and how they are to work with.
6. Hop on Skype or Google Hangouts for a Video Conference
If you’re hiring someone who can’t physically come into your office for a face-to-face interview, arranging a video conference will let you look into the candidate’s eyes and see how they carry themselves.
They can also demonstrate case studies or how they reached a creative to strategize and execute a former project and share potential concepts for your project.
7. Know the Design Firm’s Expectations of You
Ask the graphic design firm what they need from you to enable them to make your project successful.
This can include documentation, assets, proofing concepts or vendor information, especially if you plan to print materials. Knowing what they need ahead of time helps keep the project moving smoothly.
8. Provide More Depth about Your Target Market
While you will provide information on the creative brief about your target audience, providing more detail always helps.
Create a template of your buyer personas, fictional ideal clients you sell to. You may have more than one buyer persona.
Defining your target audience in more depth enables your designers to understand your company’s needs. It allows them to create a better-customized solution for your marketing problems.
9. Look for Niche Experience
A niche is an industry such as finance or retail. Working with designers that know your industry is a plus because they know more about your customers.
A project for the entertainment industry will have a different look and feel than a corporate banking client.
Working with someone who knows your niche puts them ahead of the curve and helps them know what images work to market your particular industry.
10. Learn What Inspires Designer Candidates
When interviewing a few designers it’s good to learn who and what inspires their work.
Knowing the brands, designers and books that influence and inspire them will help you learn more about their style. It can also help you to make a wiser choice which graphic design firm to hire.
Hiring the Best Graphic Design Firm
Incorporating these ten tips when searching for designers will help you choose the right firm for your business. Have a question about graphic design?
Dymic Digital provides expert digital marketing services from graphic design, website development, SEO, SEM, local search, mobile app development and more. Visit our website today to learn how we can help you strengthen your online presence improve your marketing results.
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