The visual identify of your company is often a customer’s first touchpoint with your business, making finding a local graphic designer an important consideration when optimising your digital presence. Whether you’re a budding small business or a well-established corporation, having a cohesive brand identify is crucial for connecting with your customers and communicating exactly what they can expect from interactions with your company.
However some businesses, even those well-established ones, overlook the importance of these visual elements. Whether its persisting with an outdated logo or presenting poorly designed documents to potential clients, these mistakes can quickly turn customers off your brand and lead them to dismiss your business as an option. To re-invigorate your brand, you may need to consider hiring a graphic designer who can work with you to develop brand elements that properly convey your company’s values, history and services. While it can be tempting to go with a DIY solution or a cheap, overseas designer, the true value in hiring a local graphic designer will be that collaborative process, utilising their skills to create brand collateral that makes your company stand out from the crowd.
In this article, we’ll highlight some of the things you should consider when hiring a graphic designer, how to assess your branding needs as well as reasons why you should choose local over some of the common alternatives.
Assessing Your Corporate Branding Needs
Before you rush out and hire a graphic designer, it’s important to first take stock and assess exactly what branding elements your business needs. Building a strong brand identity is about more than designing a quick logo and a few social media templates; ideally you should be creating a unique identity that can be applied consistently throughout all aspects of your business. From your brochures to your website to your front door sign, you should have a set of regularly used colours, fonts and visual elements that can be utilised appropriately in each application.
If your business lacks these items, or needs a significant update, you may need to have a new brand style guide designed specifically for your company. A brand style guide is a document that essentially lays out how your brand should be utilised in any application, from your website to your letterheads. It serves as a reference tool for other graphic designers, printers and marketers to ensure consistency in your company’s messaging and branding.
Typically, a brand style guide includes:
Logo Usage Guidelines
These guidelines will specify how your logo should be used, including acceptable variations, minimum size requirements, clear space around the logo, and guidelines for placement on different materials and backgrounds.
Colour Palette
This section will detail the specific colours that represent your brand, including primary and secondary colours, along with their corresponding hex codes, RGB values or Pantone numbers. It may also include guidelines on colour usage, such as which colours to use for different types of communication or how to maintain consistency across different media.
Typography
This section details the fonts or typefaces that should be used in brand communications, including primary and secondary fonts for different purposes (e.g., headings, body text). It may include guidelines on font sizes, styles (bold, italic etc.) and spacing.
Examples and Application
Your style guide should include examples or mock-ups to demonstrate how the brand identity elements should be applied in various contexts, such as print materials, digital platforms, advertisements and team apparel.
Usage Rules and Restrictions
It should also include guidelines on how the brand should not be represented, including prohibited colour combinations, alterations to the logo and how not to utilise your brand’s typography.
Once you have this document in place, it will much easier for both your designer and your staff to properly apply your branding and help create a strong brand identity. From your slideshow presentation templates to your social media platforms, all design work should lean on the insights contained in this brand style guide without much variation from the guidelines laid out.
One of the most important applications of these guidelines will be in the design of your website, often one of the first platforms your potential customers and clients will visit prior to engaging with your business. A website can tell these customers a lot about your business from the first landing page, so it’s incredibly important to get this platform right. This doesn’t mean cramming your home page full of text about how great your company is or ensuring your beautiful new logo takes up the entire screen. Your website should be a strong representation of the guidelines set out in your brand style guide, with well-spaced text, interactive imagery and strong visual calls-to-action all important aspects of web design that your local graphic designer may be able to help with.
Even something as simple as the primary colour of your website’s background or menu bar can be incredibly important, with the biggest brands in the world actively using colour choices to elicit different emotions and responses from their customers. Do you want customers to view you as a premium brand by using a black and white colour scheme like Apple? Or do you want to target a youth market by using brighter, edgier colours like orange and pink? Knowing exactly what colours to use to convey your business’ values and story is an incredibly powerful tool, so if you’re unsure this may be where the services of a graphic designer can come in.
Finding A Local Graphic Designer To Assist Your Business
The digital world is expanding quicker than ever and so is the online services marketplace, making the idea of outsourcing your design work to an overseas provider a tempting one. For new businesses, who may just need a simple logo design or video introduction, solutions like Fiverr and Airtasker can be of some use and can be a good starting point for your business’ corporate branding. But when you need to start using these designs in professional applications you may run into trouble, with missing filetypes, clipped logo art and low quality video outputs all common issues with these outsourcing services. You may also find it difficult to revise these elements with your outsourced designer, either needing to pay a premium for extra revision services or finding yourself unable to reach them with this provider moving on to their next overseas client.
That’s why you should always choose local when trying to find a graphic designer for your business. Instead of chasing up an overseas designer via email, you’ll be able to quickly meet with your designer in-person or catch-up over the phone to discuss any design work you need. Local graphic designers will also be more sensitive to the market trends in your region and industry, tailoring your branding elements to better suit your target audience. In the long-term these benefits will significantly outweigh the short-term cost savings of outsourcing your designs and provide you with a real asset to the marketing of your business.
But how do you determine which local graphic designer is right for your business? From large, professional agencies to local freelancers, there are likely a number of local providers in your immediate area, all with different capabilities and fee structures. The best first step is to take stock of these providers, visit their websites and assess how their own personal brands mesh with your ideas for your company. If these concepts resonate you then that can often be a strong first indicator that their values align with yours. But before you rush out to interview and hire these candidates, be sure to take note of the below items to properly assess any local graphic designer:
Review Their Portfolio And Case Studies
Experienced, professional designers usually have a significant portfolio of work on their website or social media platforms, allowing you to quickly assess their previous work and the branding elements they have helped to create. You should pay attention to the quality and style of this work and whether it aligns with the vision you have in mind for your company’s branding. They may also have case studies on their website, highlighting their design process and how they worked with their clients to achieve positive outcomes. These will significantly help you to understand these designers and assess whether they will perform well for your business.
Assess Their Creativity And Technical Proficiency
Creativity is at the heart of graphic design and innovative thinking can really make a branding element stand out from the crowd. When assessing their portfolio try and look for evidence of creative problem-solving and originality, from unique elements in their logos to websites that use that company’s branding elements in intuitive ways.
While creativity is important, you’ll also need to able to assess their technical proficiency and ability to create the outputs your business requires. Ask questions about what software programs they use, their knowledge of important printing specifications like markups and bleeds, and what type of files you’ll receive when they send back their work. Without knowledge of these technical aspects both you and the designer may run into problems, no matter how visually appealing their designs are.
Check Out Previous Customer Reviews And Testimonials
Positive feedback from previous clients is a strong indicator of a designer’s expertise and suitability for your business, with social media sources and Google listings a quick way to see if these clients were happy with your designers’ outputs. Be sure to review these platforms to get a feel for your designer’s previous work, as well as the type of client they usually work with. This will allow you to gauge just how experienced your designer is and the volume of work that they are capable of performing.
Working With Your Designer To Build A Professional Brand For Your Business
Building a professional brand for your business is crucial in today’s marketplace, with a unique and evenly applied brand identity helping you to stand out from the crowd. Working closely with a local graphic designer will help you to develop this identity and create elements that can be applied across all of your marketing platforms and documentation.
A key part of that development process will be communication, so ensure that you’re clear with what outputs you want with your designer, from how you want your website to look to how you want any documentation to be laid out. This communication process works both ways however! For the best outcomes you’ll need to listen to your designer’s ideas, supply inputs where required and hear their explanations for their outputs and why their ideas suit your brand. When this collaborative process happens with an experienced graphic designer you’re bound to get great outputs, helping you to build a strong brand identity and better engage potential clients and customers.
Ready to create a new brand identity or want to re-design your logo, website or promotional materials? At Sky High Digital we’ve helped several of our most important clients to develop unique brand identities, successfully helping them stand out in the marketplace and efficiently communicate their brand’s values, services and products. If you need corporate branding services, from logo design to stationary and signage, be sure to get in touch with our team on (03) 9723 1783 or reach out via email at enquiries@skyhighdigital.com.au.
