Working with a designer

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Please, Don't Be a Dick

10 min readJul 24, 2018

This post is part of the Please Don’t Be a Dick series. You can read the first post here.

Previous: Choosing a designer
Next: Design projects

Now that you’ve understood your goals and found a designer, it’s time to go through all the important bits before a project starts. These should include the final briefing, contract, and schedule.

The final briefing

The more that is known about the project in the beginning, the more chances that the design will suit the company, product, or service. A final briefing ensures that both parties know what needs to be done. Everyone knows that you should never lie to your lawyer or to your doctor. It is also equally important to never lie to your designer. It won’t help towards keeping you out of trouble or staying healthy, but it might help making sure time and money aren’t wasted and the result is worth your, and the designer’s, while.

When designers are left to their own devices, only having assumptions to support their personal research, they will build something general or ordinary. This is comparable to buying a suit ‘off the peg’ where it is assumed that a person with a certain width of chest will have arms of a prescribed length. Alterations can eventually be made, but with obvious limitations. If you are serious about looking the best you can possibly look, you should go for a perfectly tailored fit.

How to start the brief

The brief should contain information about the goals that should be achieved during this design project. This should include the primary and secondary problems that need to be solved and any requirements that might be needed. Before writing out your brief, it is always best to discuss what is needed with designer.

What does not belong in the brief

There will always be some exceptions to these rules but as a basis keep in mind a few things that don’t need to be included in your brief (or anywhere else in the process). It is not a place to give your preferences to styles or trends. Trends fade away and following one for the sake of popularity will leave you with something outdated very quickly.

Nothing dulls faster than the cutting edge. — Steff Geissbuhler

You’ve probably done your research on companies that you like. Although it might be valid to share these companies with the designer to discuss strategies and directions, discussing their visuals and asking for “something similar” is lazy. Having someone want to be like you is flattering, wanting to be like someone else is underwhelming.

It is the designer’s job to design — that’s why you hired them. There is no need to sketch ideas that you think will work or that you like. A designer is not a set of hands that will take your ideas and put them on a computer because you don’t know how to use certain software.

It’s obvious that no one wants stale, outdated or tacky work, there is no need to use the words “fresh”, “creative” or “stylish”. Steer very clear of these words as they have no meaning in the design-world and may elicit extreme fits of rage.

Briefing is an exam for you to test how well you understand your own business, its specifics, strengths and weaknesses. Compare it with walking through your city with foreign guests — you have a chance to look at things from the outside, with fresh eyes. You are guiding the designer through your business. It’s possible that such meditation could even help you to improve your business, to solve some other problems or make it more efficient.

The contract

Many designers and clients may argue that a contract is not needed. To some extent they are correct and it is not always necessary to have a contract. We prefer to work with one as it guarantees that the relationship remains clear — each party knows what to expect from the other and if something goes awry there is a reference to back any arguments. The contract also helps each side to understand what exactly should be done for a specified fee and in a measurable amount of time, nothing less and nothing more.

There are certain clauses you will generally find within a design contract: terms of payment, portfolio display rights, court of law, job description and termination policy. Each contract is different and should be understood by both parties before signing on the dotted line.

Terms of payment

This is generally a breakdown of how the payment should be received. Having this in writing is always vital, it makes things clear for when you need to pay, how much you need to pay, and what happens if you don’t. It also tackles the eternal back and forth questions: Why should I pay you before you do anything/Why should I do anything before you pay me?”

Any prepayment should be seen as putting funds into the initial creation of the design, towards the research, idea development, sketching, and for all the work done before there is anything to show for it. It’s a deposit. It happens everywhere, don’t be nervous about it.

Depending on the designer and the relationship with the client the payment scheme will vary. We ask for another payment on approval of design, this is solid confirmation that the client has approved the design and accepts that no changes will be made. This means we can start preparing files for print or digital production without having to worry about any unexpected alterations down the line.

The final payment usually comes just before or after delivery of work. Once again this depends on the designer and the relationship with the client. It is sometimes accompanied by a services acceptance letter that you would need to sign. This is to confirm that the project is closed and any further work could mean billing outside of the finished project.

On occasion there may be clients who believe that a designer will support a finished project forever. You’ve paid all that money and five years later you need to add another set of business cards for a new colleague, why should the designer charge you for work he’s already done? Some designers may do some work for free after the project finishes, but you would be foolish to expect this as the norm.

Portfolio display rights

Most clients won’t bat an eye about having the designer showcase the work on their portfolio or promotional platforms (Behance, blogs, etc.) but permission is not automatically granted.

For clients it’s always gratifying to see work created for their brand being admired by people and shared amongst social networks, so it’s rare that permission isn’t granted, unless it’s for legal reasons. It serves as extra publicity for the brand and brings feedback to the work.

If a designer is going to put their name on a piece of work then they wouldn’t want it to be anywhere below their standards. Having a piece of work in their portfolio is them saying that they are proud of what they created.

Court of law

Design doesn’t need to be local, clients and designers can work in different countries without the distance causing any problems. But what happens if there is a dispute that needs to be settled in court? We obviously hope that things will never come to this, but in the cases where it does neither person wants to travel outside of their area to deal with it,

and things get more complicated the further the two parties are. This is not to discourage long distance collaborations. Sometimes they can be the most beneficial.

Such scenarios vary greatly depending on the size and resources of each party. There is no definite answer to the ‘which court of law’ problem and a compromise should always be found. If a convenient place is not agreed upon then online mediation might be the best course of action. This ensures an impartial mediator will assist all parties involved to find ways to resolve any conflicts.

Job description

Probably the most important part of any contract is the definition of the job undertaken. This is an explanation of what the designer is being paid to do. The amount of detail depends on the designer. This ensures that the client doesn’t ask for things over and above the original terms, and that the designer delivers on all that’s agreed.

Why can’t you ask for things over and above, it’s your project isn’t it? If the designer invoiced for a total amount then adding three extra versions in lemon green, lime green and mint green will go over the estimated amount of time for which you were originally quoted. This time costs money. If the designer doesn’t add this to the previous invoice or to a new one then work is being done for free or at the cost of the designer/design agency.

Termination policy

When signing a contract the designer is legally bound to finish the project and deliver everything that was promised. The client is legally bound to pay for all services and expenses in full, on completion of work.

What if something happens and one of the parties wants out? There may be circumstances beyond control or the relationship could go sour. At this point it would be best to cut your losses and terminate the contract.

It is important to know who the defaulting party is and for liability to be on them. If more work has been done than has already been paid for up to that point, the designer may charge you for any expenses before terminating the contract. If the designer is at fault for whatever reason, there may be a case for them to pay off a fine before the termination of the contract. Each situation is different and needs to be assessed by all parties involved to come up with a fair solution. If no fair solution can be agreed upon then it’s probably best to sort this out in court or via mediation.

The schedule

A schedule is important, it ends with a deadline and may be punctuated by a set of sub-deadlines. A deadline is a date, e.g. 23rd May 2015. The deadline is not a span of time, it is not “a few months from now” and it certainly is not “as soon as possible”. The deadline and sub-deadlines are important for both parties. For the client; to know when work should be delivered by the designer. For the designer; to know when work needs to be finalised and delivered and when to expect feedback. A schedule can be made up as the project moves forward but it’s important to have a rough understanding of how things should progress.

A schedule may include dates for when the brief will be sent out, for when visuals should be shown, for when they should be approved, for when files need to be sent to the printer, and when they will be delivered or when the website will go live. The approval and commenting schedule is important for the designer’s accuracy with deadlines. If the schedule is bottlenecked due to a delay on approvals, a deadline may need to be extended.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe

It’s common for people to believe that having more choice is better. But choice just leaves you standing there playing eeny, meeny, miny, moe with your options. They don’t say ‘spoilt’ for choice for no reason.

Multiple options

Sometimes the need for multiple options arises from the complexity of a brief. This is probably the best, if not the only, scenario for the multiple options. If the brief has a system of complex interconnected ideas to communicate, then the presented options will be a carefully selected set of fine tuned compromises.

So how many options do you need? If you and the designer do decide to go for multiple directions rather than one it is essential that these directions differ greatly — they shouldn’t just be variations of the same concept, they should be distinctly different concepts.

When distinct concepts are created the selection process becomes more streamlined. It becomes more a choice of which direction is best to follow, what style of communication fits best, and which course can be committed to for the longest period of time. It becomes more than “which visuals do I like more?”

Designers nowadays have taken to “sketching” more than they rely on questions. We are here to warn you about the sketching business. This methodology, albeit trendy and with a high-level wow factor, may bring about ten versions of a logo. This may seem thrilling at first — to be faced with such diversity and volume. But these projects won’t end when both parties agree that the result suits the brief, but when either client or designer is so helpless against the thousand of options created that someone finally says “fuck it”, closes their eyes and points.

Choosing the concept

The question should not be “do you like it or not”. The question has to be “will it work?” Taste is a powerful thing, but remember, it is fickle. It will inevitably change, leaving your trendy logo looking dated and irrelevant. Resist it.

Getting opinions from everyone does not make the choice easier. When deciding on a concept you will feel the need to send the visuals to loved ones, colleagues or even post them up on social networks to get opinions from strangers. This is probably the worst thing that you can do. This goes back to the whole taste thing. People have different tastes, they don’t know the whole concept and they certainly don’t know your business as well as you do.

Friends and family will advise you based on their tastes, and why do their personal tastes matter to your project or company? On the other hand, it might be helpful to share the concepts with people within your business that you trust — it helps to gain a multi-angled decision, yet aiming at a singular end-point.

We once presented three branding concepts to one of our clients. He was really keen on two of them and couldn’t decide which to go for. He sent the versions to his family and different clients to see which they thought were best. Replies came in which could not have been more contradictory. Each person responded with their own opinion on why one would work better over the other. None of them gave opinions that didn’t involve their own personal taste. He emailed us and said “Now I understand why you suggested to show only one concept”.