Every good designer’s first priority is producing a product the client is thrilled with. Right behind that, is creating a gem to use in their portfolio to attract even more business. That being said, it’s important to trust your designer to produce content that is top notch. I always give my clients two thing above all, which is their preferred color scheme – as well as staying as true to their company logo design as possible without clashing with the site. TRANSLATION: The more creative freedom you give me to make an incredibly attractive and functional site, the CHEAPER YOUR QUOTE AND END PRICE will be. The more we collaborate on colors, schemes, and beveled text, the pricier the end result is sure to be. NOTE: this is in no way to dissuade those who have a strict vision. I’m great with that, too. It is simply to say that those who let me work my magic stylistically will get lower quotes if not qualify for a major discount.
It is important to remember the reason you hired a professional in the first place. Because a seasoned pro at their job knows how to look at your project from the outside and evaluate what can be better, and what can make it more successful. If you had the answers to all of this, you wouldn’t need to hire a pro in the first place other than to operate the physical mechanics that may be out of your reach due to lack of software or the know-how to use it.
Possibly the toughest thing to set aside when it comes to the look and style of your site, is emotional attachment to certain design elements that possibly you’ve used for years. The biggest culprit of the “hard to let go” design element is the company logo. We’ve all dealt with businesses who didn’t know the importance of a focused brand, but even worse are the ones who refuse to change ugly fonts, typefaces, and design elements because “That’s always been the design!”. Maybe your son designed your logo as an 8th grade computer arts project. Maybe it was passed down from generations before. Still, you have to ask yourself, “Does this design serve my website and my business as a whole in a positive manor?”.
You have to keep an open mind and look at the site that is being built as a whole. If you have a crisp, clean, bold and intuitive design that you’ve paid hundreds if not thousands of dollars for, do you really want an old logo using dated fonts, that looks like it was done by someone who just discovered Photoshop. Where every design element is used. It’s a dropshadowed, beveled and embossed, outter glow NIGHTMARE! Below I’ll present a perfect example by a local business who was kind enough to let me try a redesign for them.
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As a closing important point, remember one thing that I’ve personally always used as a model to live by in graphic design, “If everything screams, nothing screams.”. I recently was an in house designer for a company who shall remain anonymous, but the boss’ motto (which constantly undermined every clean and powerful design I ever tried to make BTW) was, “Make it jump out at ‘em!” The problem was he wanted everything to jump out. If you want to avoid this, conduct one simple test, and this applies to everything from web design to print ads. Stand back and look at your design for literally one second…then turn away. Have someone else do this also. Ask yourself what the first thing to catch your eye was. Was it the product or service you meant this design to focus on, or was it something less important, like the logo, textual information, or even worse – everything melted together in a mush of nothingness? Focus on the image, product or service that you are trying to convey. Make everything else secondary. Then…reevaluate all of the secondary elements and see if you can’t ditch them altogether.
And again…if all of the above seems like a lot to absorb, remember rule number 1. Trust. Your. Designer.
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