When you have a design project, finding designer is hard. And as hard is making sure you get the best out of their talents.  Here are some tips we’ve learnt over the years to ensure you get the best design for your budget.

1. Don’t go by a persons exuberance to do the job. Enthusiasm is great, but at the same time I’ve often seen that among designers confidence in their own ability and quality are inversely related. Often its the designer that isn’t sure they have nailed it has, and the one convinced its great, isn’t.
2. Try to find someone that understands business need and is not too heavy on the artist side of design. Having the artist side is great, but I find strongly artist type risk getting too involved in their work. You want someone that isn’t too emotionally invested in the work, where they cant take genuine feedback or scrap current progress and genuinely try again with fresh take. There’s a reason agencies put account managers between creatives and client.
3. Good design takes time. It can seem like a long time to get to something simple but its usually needed.
4. Don’t committee things. You can polish the diamond but when you’ve got a bunch of people expressing design ideas to be merged together it tends not to work. Also if there are multiple people commenting, have someone on your side take that commentary and centralise it to the designer, dont drip feed them comments or let a bunch of people send their own thoughts individually.
5. If its not working dont try to make it work. Some designers are really good overall but dont work well with the vision you want. Its not their style. If its not working it probably wont.
6. Be specific in your instructions. Don’t give them the ‘I want it to look like example A but with touches of example B’ type deal. When people look at the same thing they see different elements as what makes that example “that example”. Figure out why you like something, make sure that is the reason on another, and not some design tangent you didn’t realise. Really consider language you use when writing any design requests if you have something in mind as specifics matter and words can have many meanings.

I hope that was useful and if you have any questions or comments, please reach out.