Working With Your Lean Green Team

Being clear saves us all frustration.

Be upfront about your deadlines and check to be sure they are realistic. To be on the safe side, add a little extra time. Things generally take longer than you hope they do, and projects can often be delayed. Determine exactly what parts of the project will be done by the team at ITG, and what will be needed of you.

Give details about you and what you’re seeking in a design.

No one knows your business better than you, so tell us all about yourself! Provide us a “brand brief”, which is simply a document that describes your company, gives a description of your products and services, unique things about your company, a description of your ideal customer, some samples of logos and colors that match your branding, and samples of text you’ve written so we can get a feel for the tone of voice you use when talking to your customers. Give examples of what your competitors are doing and what you like and don’t like about what they’re doing. It is a collaborative effort, but we need to know exactly where you’re coming from to help create a vision for your marketing.

Know your audience and your objective.

These are crucial bits of information to share with us. Designers can “speak” to your audience if they know who they are. If the objective is to shock, soothe or sell, the designs can reflect these moods. More often than not, design ends up being a reflection of what the business owner likes. There’s nothing wrong with injecting your preferences into a design, after all, you have to look at it more often than anyone else. However, those preferences should only exist to the point that they mirror the preferences of your target customer. Get inside the mind of someone who you think is a perfect customer for your business. What style will they like? What words will speak to them? What imagery will evoke emotion and make them intrigued and interested in learning more about your business? It doesn’t really matter if you like photos of nature with Fall colors unless your customer can connect with those ideas. Otherwise, the piece is ineffective.

The design process should not cause angst.

Your materials are important to everyone involved, including our design team, but keep your perspective. Every piece cannot be all-things-to-all-people. Hopefully, the piece you’re working on now will be followed by another and another and another, each helping to create the cohesive whole brand image that you are trying to convey. The longer you agonize over a piece or tiny little details, the less likely your changes will appreciably change the strength of it. A brand is not won or lost on the basis of a single piece of print material or website page.

Come prepared to provide final materials.

Our graphic design fees are charged by the hour, so once we have your materials every tweak to the copy takes time. You may need to edit copy to better suit the design layout, but if you enter into the design phase with finalized copy it will save you money. Send your copy all at once, not in 10 separate emails to avoid confusion so that there are fewer mistakes.

Provide all the elements you are responsible for to ITG.

Gather up ALL the materials you are responsible for and provide it to ITG in a timely fashion. Providing us your text and images the day before you need your brochure is a recipe for disaster. Mistakes happen at the best of times, but adding an impossible deadline into the mix is only asking for trouble.

All at once, not piecemeal.

Making changes is absolutely fine, you may want to often, but doing so all in one session is the way to go. Every time you “Make the logo bigger on page 4” or “Make a page break before that subhead” we must take the time to open and assemble the digital files, style sheets, scans, photos and fonts that make up your piece to make changes. Each time you do this, you are incurring increasing hourly charges to accommodate these changes. Changes are fine; piecemeal changes are more confusing and costly. Clearly written lists of changes in an email, PDF, or Word document are always preferred.

You’ve hired us for our expertise, so please trust it.

There are many business owners who hire creative professionals and then micromanage them. This really hinders the creative process and the resulting project isn’t nearly as effective as it could be. We love your feedback, and share your enthusiasm for your projects, but our creativity hugely suffers and we cannot provide you our best work with a “backseat” designer.

When you hire us it’s important to remember that we are trained to know which images work best and how to design effectively, so please force yourself to take a step back and listen to our guidance.