It’s a cut-throat world out there and as competing businesses clamber for ever wiser customers, you should be focussed on calving out a competitive edge for yourself. A company has achieved a successful visual presence when their customers can find them when and where they are looking and more importantly, when their customers can understand them.

Graphic design is often misunderstood and seen as an unnecessary cost. Many businesses severely underutilise the power of visual design. But one thing is for sure, design led businesses stand out from the crowd. Successful businesses of any size are embracing design, using it as a strategic resource to strengthen their products and services in order to achieve profitable growth.

Visual design should not be seen as a cost. If a company is achieving a successful visual market presence, design is not money down the drain. Rather, a strong visual presence gives your customers a compelling reason to buy from you and not your competitors.

Before any potential client walks through your door, your visual identity is a representation of your company. It can make you look fun or serious, large or small, traditional or forward thinking, professional or unprofessional. You need to strike a chord with your target audience. Customers know what they want. The question is, can you successfully communicate to them that you know what they want and that you have it?

Here are a few things to think about:
What does your logo say about your company?
What impression does your company literature give your potential customer?
You target audience is on the web, are you?
If you are on the web, is your website pulling customers in or turning them away? Why?
Can your customers find you and can they understand what you offer?

1. Go for a broad skill base. You need to partner with a designer who understands the many ingredients that come together to make successful communication tools – a designer who is creative AND understands marketing, communication and business principles. You should be looking for skills that include design, copywriting, marketing, ability to produce web and paper based communication tools and project management. For example, there’s no point in having the snazziest website design if the navigation is so poor people never get past the home page or if the word content of the site switches viewers off!
2. Portfolio’s speak. Look for a range of design solutions for an assortment of clients. A broad portfolio shows a designer can do what they’re meant to do – successfully communicate different messages to varying target audiences.
3. If a designer asks lots of questions that’s a good sign. To produce good results, a designer needs to fully understand your business. To find out everything they need to know they need to ask you the right questions. So don’t be put off when a designer asks to meet you, clarify things or even comes up with a design questionnaire!
4. Go for price confidence. Designers that know they provide profitable solutions are price confident. They won’t shy away from a price discussion but neither will they throw a random price at you without assessing what you need. And they won’t offer massive price discounts as soon as they sense any hesitation from you, rather they will be able to explain what value they offer you.
5. Be impressed with a detailed estimate. There’s nothing worse than a big black hole swallowing your money. Rather, a quality designer will understand that you want to know exactly what your investment is getting you. Before you invest make sure you know what is and isn’t included.
6. A good designer will stay in touch. It’s difficult to know if a designer will do a good job of keeping you informed during a project if you’ve not worked with them before but you can often tell from the standard of communication during the early stages of the project discussion and proposal submission.
7. Testimonials serve as a good guide. It shouldn’t come as a shock to a designer for you to ask them for some testimonials. If they’re any good they should have loads! In fact they should be readily available either on the designers website or submitted in their proposal.

Follow these tips and you should be well on your way to finding the right designer to partner with on a long term basis – a designer who will positively affect your profitability. If you’ve got this far then, well, we tick all of the above so you can always choose us!

The resources section will:
— get our clients on the right track
— decode potential complications
— clear up various design myths
— help readers avoid common pitfalls
— and be highly valuable, to the point and practical

Of course such worthy content will take time to develop – much of it is in various minds, scribbled in an assortment of notebooks and started but unfinished in a range of computer files. And so we ask for your patience, we’ll announce new content very loudly so you don’t miss anything!