Things to Consider Before Consulting with Graphic Designers
Before we jump into the visuals of your brand or company, we need to understand your message. What is your overall goal or mission with your brand? Having a solidified understanding of what your goal is will make it easier for you and your designer to discuss your visual needs as your design needs to coincide with your company’s messaging. This is how you communicate and how your brand speaks to your target audience.
So what are some things that you need to think about when creating your brand’s message?
- Does your brand message refer back to your brand or product? In other words, does it relate back to your company’s mission?
- Does it deliver your message?
- Is it understandable for your target audience?
Your Message
Your Brand
How is your brand different from your message? Now that you have your message figured out, it is important to think about how you want that message to be portrayed.
Your brand is going to represent your company’s mission visually. This includes your company’s logo, design elements, voice and tone, graphics, and your mission (your message). If you are having trouble trying to figure out where to begin, this is a great starting point for you and your designer as long as you have your mission figured out. Understanding what you want your brand to look like will make it easier later on when you are going through the details with your designer.
There are elements to your brand that you can discuss with your designer – the colours, the shapes, the fonts, etc. These all tie into the visual aspects of your branding and the emotions you wish to evoke.
Now that you have your brand and message, it’s time to think about your needs. What’s the best way to represent your mission’s needs? For example, if you are developing a product to sell, it might be useful to think about branding patterns, stickers, and cards as opposed to traditional stationery. Will your brand need a website, videos, images? Or do you need templates to follow for more consistent social media posts? Considering these things are a part of the design process to make it easier to keep the brand consistent.
Your Needs
Research Your Designer
Finding the right designer to work with can be overwhelming, and this is fully dependent on the type of needs you have. Some companies prefer to work with agencies while others prefer to work with independent designers. Saving work and designs you like will give you a great starting point for the next step.
Knowing what you want out of your project will make researching your designer easier. This will help you narrow down your list when you can align your goals with a designer that you trust to execute your visions.
The most important thing to consider before talking to a designer is creating a mood board. Having visual examples of your ideas will help during the discovery process with your designer. This is a great way to truly dive into the visual aspects of your branding and company and find a balanced execution of your brand. Creating a mood board is more than just adding pictures you think look nice to an album. It’s about curating your taste to create a specific feeling. Hence the term “mood board”.
When you look at these image that you want your brand or company represented by, what do you see? How does it make you feel? Taking these things into consideration will help ease the discovery phase with your designer. It also makes for a great reference for the project to make sure everyone is aligned with the same concept.
Create a Mood Board
