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Understanding the Needs of Your Client

I'm Justin. Celia. Wanna welcome you back to graphic design fundamentals, And in this course, I'm gonna be talking about practical work flows for graphic designers. Basically, you're gonna go through my creative process as I work with a client and also work on some collateral for that client that I'm going toe go all the way from concept to creation on and then turn it over to the client at the very end as a final delivery ble. So this is gonna be a really exciting course, because we're gonna go through a lot of stuff. I'm gonna go through things like meeting with the client, going through revisions, initial ideation. We're gonna go into photo shop and learn how to work in there. We're gonna work in Illustrator to create a logo that we're gonna put it all together inside of in designed to do a page layout. By the end of it, you're gonna have some riel tangible results that you can take with you so you can say Wow, You know what? I can do this. It's gonna be a fun course. Gonna be excit...

ing time. I'm really stoked to get started on it. So let's go ahead and dive right in. So first and foremost when we're talking about graphic design, chances are we're working for some sort of a client that could be a client that you're doing freelance. It could be a client at work because even when your boss comes to you and tells you to do something, that's a client, you're serving someone as a client, and so initially, what you have to do is you have to do some sort of initial consultation with that person. Now, in general, when you're working in an office like environment, your boss is just going to give you something like maybe a spec sheet or an email that just details what he needs. And that's fine. That's a rudimentary version of a creative brief. But if you're in freelance graphic designer and you're working with clients, chances are you're going to need your own creative brief. And so I've got a digital version of mine, at least a truncated version of mine right here on spring. And so basically a creative brief is something almost like a questionnaire that you develop that you give to your clients so that when you have that initial consultation, you can get a better understanding of who they are, what they do and what they need from you. So in this particular example, I'm going to be working with Jake, my client. He'll be on set a little bit later on to go through some of this with us. But for now, we're just talking about the initial consultation. So, you know, Jake came to me and he wanted me to do a logo for his film company. And I had to initially get him to fill out this brief in the brief, essentially asked lots of questions about the business about what they do and about how they want the end product to make people feel. So let me show you some of the questions that I go through here. Number one. Please provide some information about your business. Tell me about what you do, how you do it. The people that work for your business and what type of aesthetics you think best represent the industry or office environment that you work in. This is something that I asked everybody. I want to know as much as I can about the company and the culture that surrounds it so that I get a good idea for what type of themes I need to incorporate into the design piece that I'm working on. Second here, describe your product or products and your customers and the industry. What do you sell, who buys it and why? By allowing me to understand the target demographic, I can better tailor whatever it is that I'm creating to suit those needs. Because even if you perceive your company to be one way, your demographic might dictate that your product is seen another. That's not to say that I won't stick with whatever you tell me to dio, but I need a little bit of an idea about how other people perceive you so that I can work that into the equation as well. Now here's one of my favorite pieces, because this is always fun to see exactly what people answer. So I always say, select all that apply. I would describe my brand as blank and some of the choices I give our youthful, mature, playful, sophisticated, economical, expensive, casual and professional. As you can imagine, not too many people write down expensive, but for the most part, this is gives me a great idea of how the person or persons that I'm working for seize their company. So I get it. I get a nice contrast in view. I get who they're working for, what types of products they sell on, who buys it. So that gives me an idea of how those people see the business. And then I get their side of how they see the business. And this allows me to kind of work out a balancing act between the two. Because if somebody comes to me and they say OK, our target audience is kids were selling toys to kids, But then in the second part here, they mark themselves as professional and sophisticated. Well, that doesn't exactly coincide with being a youthful, fun kid brand, so I have to figure out how to, ah, how evenly way those things out. I may even come back to the client and say, You know, you say that you sell X, Y and Z, but you also said that you're sophisticated and you know professionals. It doesn't really mesh for me. So can you kind of explain that a little bit? Some of these questions will have follow up questions, and that's perfectly OK when you're going through this initial consultation. Don't be afraid to ask any questions at all, because any information you get from your client is going to be MAWR information that you can feed off of to create a product that they're ultimately going to be happier with in the end. All right, Next question. What are the goals with this new brand identity? So this is actually for a logo package, slash brand identity, and I'm wanting to know what are their goals with that, what will determine whether or not I've done my job when this is over, that's very important because I'm all about customer service and making sure whoever purchases something from me or whoever hires me to do something is satisfied with the end result. And so I need to know what does success look like, what this failure look like? And that is the question that I ask in order to kind of get that information out of them. Now here's some little fun questions that I always asked was This just gives me a little bit more information about the time the kind of person I'm dealing with. So what's your favorite color and what's your least favorite color and why? This gives me a good idea of their aesthetic taste. So if they say that their favorite color is read, that's pretty straightforward. Easy to work with. No problem. If they say that their favorite color is seashell white with a hint of turquoise. That means I'm gonna have a little bit of, ah, complicated problem on my hands here. So this is not only to get an idea of what their favorite color is, but also get an idea of how complicated the situation is going to be in terms of revisions. So all of these were built out for me not only to get information about them that makes it easier to design, but also information about them that makes it easier for me to work with them. And then what's your least favorite color? So the least favorite call. Why do I want to know that? Because I want to know what colors to avoid. If they hate blue and I have done a logo that is primarily blue, it's not gonna go over too well, so I always want to know up front. What's the what's your favorite? What's your least favorite? That way I can skate somewhere in the middle. Now find a logo that you like. Tell me what it is and tell me why you like it. This is very important because this gives me an idea of exactly what their aesthetic preference is for a logo. The things that I can discern here are Do they like iconography? Do they like brand marks with no text? Do they like primarily text? If they like text? What kind? There are so many factors that go into this favorite logo of theirs that can help me decide how I approach this particular project. So I always make sure that I get that question answered. Sometimes people don't forward me the answer to that, and I always come back to them and say, Please, I need this specific answer and I want them to send me an actual copy of the logo. I don't want them to just tell me the company name because there are tons of companies out there, especially if you're dealing with local businesses. So it could be like Johnny's auto repair. I love Johnny's auto repairs logo. Well, you know me. Johnny's auto repairs there probably are in the United States. I want him. I want them to send me a picture of it. It could be a photo of their sign outside of their office. It doesn't matter. I just want to see what that logo looks like. Then we've got final thoughts. Anything else that they want me to know before I get started? This is where they can give me stuff like maybe their mission statement or projects that they're working on or credits that they might have. Or sales numbers. It could be anything they want me to know. That's gonna help me build this logo so that they're happy with it. And that's ultimately, what do you have to convey to your client? Look, I'm not doing this to make you do paperwork. I'm not doing this to be a pain. I'm doing this so that you and I both get exactly what we want. I get paid, you get a logo win win, Soe, once you send this off to somebody, what you're going to dio is you're gonna get it back. And here is the completed creative brief that Jake sent me back for his company. And so some of the things I'll just go through some of these briefly some of the things that they want out of this. So information about the business. So the uh, business is an independent film and video production company, and they use production as a creative outlet. He said that, um, it's called FB Productions and he says, We take on projects that we're passionate about, and we know that we will have fun making. That was a key statement to me that last part of it was a key statement to me because they take on things that they are passionate about and things they know. They'll have fun making that tells me a lot about the business. It tells me this business is not in existence purely for profit, right. It's it's in existence because these guys love what they dio and they're excited about what they dio. And so that means that this brand should reflect that in their personality, it says. Describe your products and customers so says we're currently working on a 20 minute short film, and the goal here is to have the film shown at festivals around the world and their primary customers would be festival programmers and people that attend those types of events. That also tells me a lot because I've been to a lot of independent film festivals. I attend several throughout the year, so I know that crowd. I know the types of aesthetics that I've seen there. I can even go to an industry event like that and take pictures. Or I can look online at pictures from different film festivals around the world, and I can start to gather information and put together mood boards. So again, more powerful information that they've given me here select all that apply. They would describe their brand as playful, casual and professional, so that means that I can have a little bit of levity in there. But at the end of the day, this is still a business, that professional end of that. That's a good book end, because that lets me know how far I can go. If they had told me just playful, casual and youthful, that means I could probably have free range to make this like a millennial as I possibly could. But in this case. I get to cut it off at the end and add a little bit of professional touch. So that tells me something that limits the amount of typefaces I can use that limits the scope of the iconography or the brand mark that I can use, and that really puts up what I called guard rails. I don't like being micromanaged by my clients. I don't want them to dictate everything that I do. But I do like for them to give me guardrails. So that way I can bump into those guard rails as much as I want. But as long as we get from Point A to point B and everybody's safe, that's all that matters, All right, what are your goals with this new brand identity and what will determine whether or not I've done my job? So this says that they are industry professionals with confidence in their craft, and they not run a business before, so it's brand new. This is brand new business brand new company. That's good because that means that I don't have any existing branding to go off of, and I don't have to worry about stepping on toes. There I don't worry about breaking any traditions or anything like that. This is I've green grass to play on essentially, and it says that they want to be taken seriously as they continue to grow in scope and raise awareness for their brand and what they're doing. So this needs to be in my head. That means this needs to be something that represents their their ah, personality. It also needs to be something that shows their passion, but then it also needs to be something that's recognizable. The key thing that I heard in there was raised brand awareness, so this needs to be something that people can identify very quickly. If you think about the movie logos that you see before movie comes on, you've seen things like a lion growling or you've seen things like letters that come up that you know, indicate a production company that you know. Chances are you recognize that without even realize that you recognize it, and that's because those things are iconic and that's what they're looking for here. They're looking for something iconic so that when that logo comes on screen, people automatically go, Uh, that's I have big that's going beyond this is gonna be good. This is going to be about, you know, something that's fun. There's something I care about and that's what they want. They want to drum up that emotion from this logo, and so that's what I'm going to try to go for. Now find a logo that you like, Tell me what it is and tell me why you like it. So they found a brewing company logo that they liked, and I reviewed that logo. It was very it was heavily icon based. Right ahead. A brand mark is ah, lion and it had some text on. They're not A whole lot wasn't dominated. The main thing was an image that was part of that logo. So that told me that this is the main thing that I need to do. I need to create some sort of brand mark, and that brand mark should be able to stand alone without any text around it or beside it or underneath it. That way, people can still recognize what the brand is without actually having to see the company name. That's what that kind of thing tells me because they're saying that they recognize that brand based on that, and that's the kind of logo they like. It was simple in its approach, not a lot of complex illustration happening, and it was also one color logo is black on white, so that means that they're looking for simplicity. And that's another thing that's important because over complicating something can be a big problem, especially when the aesthetic taste of the client skews more towards the minimalistic side. So all all things you need to keep in mind, and then the final thoughts here, anything else they should know? They explained to me how I F B productions came to be. They give me a little bit of information behind that. And so they tell me a little bit about the people that are involved with it. Nicholas, Alexander, Jake and Chris. And so they talk about how they work together, how they communicate with each other using the I f B interruptible fold back. And that's where this all came from. And so I get a really good idea of who these guys are, and I realized that they're all buddies, they all hang out, and this is this is a passion project, so it should be something that reflects all of that. So this creative brief ultimately is my roadmap for where I go from here. And all of this information is something that I used to start off my initial phase of work. And so once you have that done, once you have your creative brief, then it's time to go and get a little bit more information in terms of the nuts and bolts of the prison to are not the presentation. Excuse me? Oh, the project that you're working on. So the idea here is to set up some sort of contract. Now, I didn't have Jakes on a contract, but in the real world, I would automatically send over a statement of work and a contract that would determine things like the scope, the timeline, the budget and all of that kind of stuff. If you watch my getting started with graphic design course there creativelive, you probably saw how I talked about my flat fee versus hourly fee pricing model. Well, the idea behind that is that certain projects require flat fee. Certain ones are hourly, and everybody always wants to know which one do you do and why. Well, for a project like this, I would probably incorporated variable pricing model so I would probably charge a flat fee for the logo itself simply because I do know that this is a new business and they are just getting off the ground. And I don't have anything that I have toe work with or change that's already in existence. I'm coming up with all this by myself. And so those are all things Aiken. I can kind of price out, right? I know what that's going to entail. And so I would set that as a set fee, and then I would have a revisions contract as an addendum to that. And so they would. They would pay me extra per hour for any revisions after the final delivery. Herbal has been created not talking about revisions during the actual creation process, because that's gonna happen. Generally, I tell people that once we have the initial consultation and I send you my rough ideas, you will tell me what the rough ideas are that you like. I will flush those out in digital form, and then once we do that will decide on a specific digital direction to go. And then after that, I give you three revisions. I'll give you three revisions on that. So that way I send you my initial thought. You tell me what you do or don't like. I take that back, I give you another one, you say Okay, You know, there might be some little tweaks in there. Then I give you the final version and then we move on from there. If I deliver something and then three weeks from now, you're like, You know what? We really don't like that. The type out to the right of this. That's where the revision contract kicks in. Because then I could go back. I can say, OK, you know, no problem. I'll just put you on the clock and I'll charge that way. And so that's that's all. Something that needs to be defined up front in a statement of work or in the maintenance contract or whatever you call it. So that way, everybody is clear from the jump, exactly what's expected of them and how much they're going to pay for it.