Benefits of working with a designer

Maybe you’ve considered working with a designer but aren’t sure where to even begin. Although it may seem overwhelming, there are actually a ton of benefits to working with a designer, like helping you understand who your audience is and how to attract them to your business, stand out in your target market, and create a brand that will last a long time. But before you can decide to work with designer, you have to understand a few things about your own business first.

Understanding your business

Knowing your business’ stage

It’s always helpful to know what stage of business you are in in order to understand it better and what you may need to help it grow. If you’re only just starting out, it may not be worth the investment for you to work with a designer on a logo when you haven’t gained enough experience, income, or stability yet. If you’ve been around for a bit and know you want to stick with your business for a lifetime, working with a designer will help increase the longevity of it and help you stand out.

If you need help determining where you are in your business, you can take our short quiz! This will help you analyze what stage of business you’re in and what kind of design work you might need based on that.

Determine what you need

Now it’s important to think about the things that are failing in your business. Where do you feel like things are lacking? What would you want to improve? How do you think design could help this? You don’t have to have all the answers when you decide to work with a designer, but understanding any pain points you have in your business currently will help ease the conversation along and help your designer know how to accurately diagnose your business.

Know your budget

Working with a designer can be an investment, especially if your business is still small and growing. Once you understand where you are in your business, you can find the designer who may be the best fit for you, based on your needs and budget. Be sure to talk to your designer about what the investment might be, payment plan options, if they offer them, and provide your allotted budget for your project so the designer can work with you to ensure you get what you need for a fair and reasonable price.

If you’re considering hiring a designer but don’t know how much you' might have to invest now, you can read our notebook entry on logo design pricing and how much a designer costs to work with.

Benefits of working with a designer

So, maybe now you understand your business a little better, but you’re still unsure what the benefit of working with a graphic designer would be, or how graphic design can help your business. There are several benefits but here are a few of the main ones.

Connecting with your target audience

When you work with a designer, your designer should be trained to understand how to identify your target audience. They’ll work with you to define who that person is that your business is communicating to and then be able to take that information and create a logo, graphics, and define styles to accurately communicate with them. 

Finding your audience is one thing, but being able to communicate with them and understand them, their needs, their problems, and help solve those problems through design is important. That isn't to say a great product on it’s own can't do well without design, but if you don't have the proper branding or marketing you could be communicating with the wrong audience and leaving money on the table or leaving your ideal audience behind. 

By communicating with the right audience, you're also helping to establish yourself as a real business. Those people who eventually become your fans because they've found you through your branding and marketing and have been able to resonate with your business—those are the people who will stick around and help provide word of mouth marketing by providing reviews, telling their friends, and wearing or showing your product. It’s free promotion! It will help create a foundation of trust for your audience, but it will also establish a base of authenticity and trust for future customers.

Providing correct file types

When most people start their business, they might create their own logo without understanding just how many places their logo needs to go; printing on shirts, hats, business cards, stamps, store signage, stickers, billboards—there are so many opportunities for a logo to be used, but if you don’t have the correct file types, your logo will be completely useless. Even if you don’t think you’ll be printing on t-shirts now, it’s always beneficial to make sure you have all the file types you need so you don’t have to go back and redesign your logo in the correct file type later on. By working with a designer, they’ll be able to build out every file type you’ll need so you’ll be set up for success. Having the correct file types will allow you to quickly upload your logo to printing websites, work with vendors, and get your logo used wherever you need without any hassle or delay.

Working with vendors

Speaking of vendors, there are many cases where printing your logo on a business card you made by hand at home will be convenient, but if you’re thinking of embroidering your logo on a hat or getting it screen-printed on a t-shirt, you might not know exactly how to go about getting that done or where to even start. Most designers have a full network of vendors for merchandise printing, packaging, and other specialty printing to make your brand look professional. They’ll also be able to communicate with the vendor directly so you don’t have to worry about paper weights and types, spot printing and other complicated jargon, extra costs, shipping, etc. and just worry about the final, end result.

There are many benefits to working with a designer, but ultimately you’ll get set-up with everything you need right off the bat so there’s no extra hassle or time spent trying to figure out how to do it yourself and wasting time you could be focusing on doing the work you love.

If you’re looking for someone to help you build your business right, you can fill out our client application to get a custom quote on your project.