How to Be a Better Client

Freelance designers know how to be freelancers, and if they don’t there are plenty of quality articles that can tell them how to.

There are the ‘How Much Do I Charge’ articles the ‘How Do I Write A Service Agreement’ articles and of course the ‘But How Much Do I Charge If It’s A Good Friend” articles. What seems to be missing however, are articles that describe what should be expected of the client. Or in other words, the ‘How To Be A Good Client’ article.

The really good freelancers have learned by trial and error the detrimental effects that lousy clients can have on thier business and sanity. Many have even learned to smell a crooked potential client a mile away.

But at times, even the best of us can end up with the short end of the stick, doubting our skills and our worth.

Although this article may not be read by the one’s who need to see it the most, It may be just as helpful to freelancers who don’t yet know what SHOULD be expected of a client or potential client.

Addressing this to someone who is looking to hire a freelancer and assuming that said freelancer is somewhat seasoned, here are a few guidelines of note.

Figure Out What You Want – A designer needs a little more than “I want a modern looking site for my business”. You may not be the most tech savvy dude on the planet, but you should at least have a solid idea of what you do and do not want. A little research goes a long way. Check out some other sites or logos on the web that interest you and refer to them when talking to your freelancer.

Dont’ Be Cheap – If you hire a designer for $25 an hr. your design is going to look like you hired a designer for $25 an hr. Designing is more than just pixel-pushing. It takes a plethora of various refined skills, from understanding of typography to extensive knowledge of various software design platforms, not to mention the industry and market research that your designer engages in before beginning your project. This is your web presence, corporate identity or possibly your attempt at becoming the next Google or Facebook, either way it is being custom made to your specifications. How much is that worth to you?

Sign the Bloody Contract! – Yes, It is standard for a freelancer to send you one. Yes, it is standard for a freelancer to deny you speculative work and require a deposit before they begin working on your project. Remember a service agreement is not a ransom note, the designer most likely does not have an evil master plan to kidnap your project details and mocks until you pay up. it has been designed and put into place in order to protect the interests of all parties involved. If you have concerns about the terms and conditions set forth in the agreement you can negotiate some mutual changes, but first make sure you’ve done the following:

1. Read the contract.
2. Respond to the freelancer and let them know that you will be looking it over and getting back to them shortly.
3. Read the contract.
4. Make note of anything that you might find suspicious or disagreeable.
5. Read the contract.
6. Have your lawyer read the contract (although rarely necessary).
7. Don’t skip to step 4 if you haven’t yet done step 2.
8. Don’t do anything until you READ the contract.

You get the idea.

Send Them What They Need to Work With – Do you have a logo? Did you provide them with a project scope or details? Some examples of what design elements interest you? You don’t need to do the work for them, but letting them know that you hate bright purple or that you like tabbed navigation can save you alot of time (and money) down the road.

Don’t Call Them if You Get the Urge to Change the Header Font at 6am – The designer needs time. Time to do a little research or look over the project scope and details that you provided them. Tiny technical revisions are annoying when they are trying to get thier creative juices flowing and conceptualize the project. Make a list of all the things that you think you might want to change. Bring them all up at the appropriate time. Keep in mind that many freelancers keep strange hours and may end up working on your project while the rest of the world is sleeping. Don’t worry it WILL get done.

The Designer Knows Best A persistent client who doesn’t take the advice they’re paying for is cursed to get what they insist upon. The freelancers first mock is a sea foam green logo with a nice Sans-Serif Tahoma for the site content. Sure, you like the color red and you really really want to use that cool Captain Podd font. But what you may not know is that Captain Podd will look more like Captain Illegible when rendered in any web browser besides your own, and unless you’re sending out an SOS, red might not be the best choice for your healthspa logo. Have you thought about that? No? Well your freelancer did.

It’s Teamwork – Never mind the ‘client’, ‘freelancer’ labels, in the end you’re just collaborators on the same side of the line whose ultimate purpose is to produce great (and hopefully lucrative) work. Work that with a little cooperation might just surpass either one’s expectations.

Case Study Part 1: Logo Design with a Taste of Ginger

Every once in a while, I come across a great design project with just the right balance of technical challenge and creative freedom. The recent restaurant logo design I did for Wild Ginger was one of those projects. The owners of Wild Ginger Japanese Restaurant wanted a unique look, something with traditional Eastern flavor but with a modern edge. They planned to use the design for their restaurant building sign as well as feature it on their menus, take out boxes and the like. I was particularly excited about this project because I had never designed a sign for a building before and the prospect of having one of my creations glowing in neon at the entrance to a restaurant sounded really cool : )

This post is part creative encounter, part design tutorial, as I thought there might be other designers out there stepping into the print world for the first time, that could benefit from a recount of some of my design foibles and triumphs.

Where To Start

The only compulsory design elements that needed to be incorporated into the logo were a ginger plant and the restaurant’s name. Everything else was pretty much up to me. Now I’ve seen a ginger root, but a ginger plant? I decided to start with a little research. Using a few pictures of vibrant green ginger plants that I found around the web, I tried to sketch something that reflected their best angles and qualities. I wanted it to look fresh, clean, but also a little bit wonky and well… wild! My doodles resulted in this:

Not much to look at yet, but my mind was already bubbling with ideas for color and shading. I jumped into Photoshop to setup my workspace. To keep things nice and tidy, I setup my layers panel like this:

Next I created a single image made up of a few different vector shapes that resemble my sketch.

It’s All In The Name

Time to move onto the wordmark. Just to refresh, in logo design there are really three main types of logos.

1. Wordmark – Which consists of the company name in a stylized type that may include small abstract or pictorial elements. Examples include:


2. Abstract Mark- Which uses abstract shapes and symbols to convey an idea or attribute about the organization. Examples include:


3. Emblem- Which features the name of the company typically enveloped by a pictorial element or shape. Examples include:

Regardless of which of the three design types I’m working on, I think it’s the wordmark that is most important. The brand name is what represents the business and it’s also how people will find the establishment and how they will associate their style. Only a handful of companies are privileged enough to go ‘sans wordmark’ so unless your Nike’s next trainer or on the McDonalds dollar menu, the focus and emphasis should be first on Wordmark (typography, kerning and layout) and second on Abstract Mark or Emblem incorporation.

In the case of Wild Ginger, their logo design needed to be a combination of a wordmark (the restaurant name) and an abstract mark (the ginger plant). Since this was going to be on the restaurant building (and thus blown up to Google Maps sized proportion), I didn’t want to go with your average Helvetica or Arial, no, this needed to special and one of a kind.

Typography

I knew the perfect font to start with, a little something I purchased a while back and have rarely if every used commercially. It’s ultra modern and a little playful, yet not too so much so that it’s unreadable or unprofessional. You can download this font for free here!

Now while I adore this particular font in it’s entirety, It just wasn’t custom enough for my client, so I decided to deconstruct it, keeping the letters that I really liked and replacing the ones that I wasn’t so keen on with others. But I saved a copy of the original font for the Wild Ginger text untouched on a hidden layer so that I could refer back and always have a fresh working copy.



Then I retyped the letters that I wanted to keep from that font, with each letter on a separate layer, so that I could manually adjust the kerning (space between the letters).

I had a pretty good idea of the attributes I was looking for in the letters and with a little trial and error I came up with a 5 font combination that really fit. I kept each letter on it’s own layer so that I could change the size, height, baseline etc of the different fonts. Because as you know, not all fonts are created equal :)

Next I messed around with the placement of the wordmark in relation to the abstract mark. At first, I sort of just stuck it in between the two words because I didn’t really like how it looked anywhere else. But something was definitely missing, some sort of punctuation or separation, that’s when I started to get creative with color.

Layout and Background

I was a little stumped for ideas, until I started thinking about the various applications of the logo. “What will it look like on the menus”? I pondered. I decided to play around with this thought to help spur my imagination.

I started with a horizontal separation using blocks of color. I wanted to go with red for sure as an accent and to give it an Asian feel and then another more subdued color for contrast and balance. The charcoal gray worked perfectly with the red gradient.

I thought that the logo needed a tag-line or some sort of phrase to go with it. Well it’s a Japanese Restaurant right? Let’s go with that.

Perfect, that fits, now there’s more of clear cut purpose to this separation idea that I was feeling it needed. And the ginger plant doesn’t look so randomly placed (although it kinda was ; ). Also, the vibrant, rich red color of the background told me exactly what color the ginger needed to be. I got to work on a nice lime to light lime green gradient that sort of mimics the sun illuminating it from above. I also inverted the text color to make it pop against the background. Now this is looking pretty good, time to see what the clients think.



The response was unanimous and positive! They really loved the overall concept, typography choice and colors, just a few minor changes to accommodate the building sign company and the menu company before the logo is finalized.

One thing they requested that I change was the tagline from “Japanese restaurant’ to “Pan-Asian Cuisine”. Now, the only thing left to do was to convert the whole thing to a vector so that it is fully scalable for whatever medium they decide to display it on.

Now Photoshop and vectors aren’t the best of friends, so for the next post I’m going to jump into Adobe Illustrator to do a few quick and basic things to make my logo print ready.

Stay Tuned!

A Home For My Themes

     

A recent alarming drop in my free HD GB has prompted me to do a thorough search for content whose purpose might be better served elsewhere. My findings (which were equally alarming) included photos from freshman year (not mine), logo designs from before I knew what “vector meant” and a plethora of other particulars I’ll refrain from mentioning here. Of the more interesting things I came across were a few website endeavors that never really made it off the ground, so to speak. So, instead of roasting chestnuts on an open flame, I used my holiday in a more productive manner and created a cozy little place for all of my website templates and themes. Thus, I’m happy to introduce themes.pronetoponder.com!

Each theme package comes stock full of customizable standards complaint coding, semantic CSS and Photoshop designed goodness. Pick one up for yourself or check out what I have available at ThemeForest.

Cheers to New Beginnings and A Very Happy New Year!

72photos on Read Write Web

Thanks to Sarah Perez for this thorough and insightful write-up.

Breakdown of Modern Web Design

          

Thanks to Alan Foreman of poisonedminds.com for this unsettlingly accurate depiction.