Often when we’re approached to create a piece of graphic design by a new client, especially by start up businesses who are unused to dealing directly with creative suppliers, we tend to get asked questions which crop up more than once or twice. Here we’ve listed a few things to keep in mind which will help to keep your design project as cost effective as possible.
Budget and costs
Have a think about budget. You can give us a brief on any graphic design project and ask us to quote for doing the work, we can then give you a rough cost based on how long we think it will take to complete the task. A different approach would be to try to establish how much of your budget you want to put towards a particular project. With this in mind we can go about defining what can be done within this budget to give you the best results. We work on an hourly rate and a rough guide to the way we charge and possible outlays can be found on our pricing information page.
Provision of content
If we’re designing any kind of document for you, an ad, a brochure, a leaflet, even a website, you’re likely to want to add some of your own existing imagery or text. We do of course provide a copywriting service and can supply stock images or photography when you require it, but often there will be occasions when you’ll want to supply us with your own.
Copy – Our preferred format to receive copy or text would be a Microsoft Word® document but we can also accept copy directly by email. Avoid sending us scanned documents, printed documents or any documents that make it difficult to select and cut text ready to be pasted into a layout file. Re-typing documentation is a time consuming task and also provides an increased margin for errors in your text. Remember to include notes where you’d like images to appear within your text if you have a preference. We have tools to check spelling and grammatical errors accurately. We’ll provide these checks as standard, however unless we’ve been advised by yourself to suggest wording adjustments or rewrite your copy, we will keep it as you supplied. Therefore it’s important for you to get as close to what you ultimately want as possible in order to avoid text and layout amends further along in the process.
Images – It’s best practice to supply us with any images you’d like to use at the highest resolution possible, especially if we’re working on a piece of graphic design which is to be printed. The best way to detect a high resolution image is to check the size of the file you are going to send. (A jpeg that has a file size of 3mb is likely to be a higher resolution than one of 30kb.) Try to give us the biggest file sizes possible when it comes to images. The closer you can get to the source of the original image will give you your best shot and try not to supply images taken from websites as these are notoriously too small for printed graphic design.
Reference material
You could phone us up and say “Hello, we sell flipflops and we need a nice brochure.” This would be fine but it would make your project more complicated, requiring market research and lots of background work. If you want to keep things as cost effective as possible, it would be a good idea to put some research in yourself to give us a springboard to work from. Besides, you already have a better working knowledge of your specific market and competition. Give us a base of information like competitors names and websites and reference to any marketing materials they are using. We value your opinion so give us examples of designs and colour schemes that you think work and reasons why you like them. No matter how silly they may seem, always give us any thoughts or preferences you have for your design work, it’ll help us to work alongside you as a team and provide you with a design that works on a practical level for your target market and on a personal level for yourself and your business.