Pro Motion Media Blog

This could also be called ‘The Cre­ative Phase — Part Two’   once the sketch­ing is done, the brain is well and truly stormed and the strongest ideas have been short­listed, I’ll work up the designs on the Mac using In Design, Illus­tra­tor and Pho­to­shop. I was read­ing an inter­view with David Car­son one time and he was talk­ing about how he loves the Adobe®  soft­ware as you can copy and paste between them — I had no idea!!! That was a few years ago now need­less to say it’s now much used and a great time saver espe­cially for try­ing out dif­fer­ent fin­ishes and ren­der­ings of a design or mix­ing up vec­tor art­work with some Pho­to­shop effects.  This may be bor­der­line heresy but I do find InDesign’s draw­ing tools much more user friendly than Illus­tra­tor (cer­tainly more than Pho­to­shop).   In terms of for­mal pre­sen­ta­tion for logos I’ve been taught that show­ing the logo with plenty of white space and approx­i­mately the size it will be seen on a let­ter­head is a good rule of thumb. I’ll gen­er­ally keep it to no more than three on a page.  For logo work, I’ll often show the design in colour, greyscale and black and white, so the client can see how it will work in dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances.   If I’m pre­sent­ing a full set of mate­r­ial (logo design, sta­tionery and pub­lic­ity mate­r­ial) I may show the design ‘in situ’ so the client can see the whole pack­age ‘work­ing’ together.

All proofs are sent out on email as PDFs which is great for time-stamping proofs and cre­at­ing a paper trail. At this point I should also send a proof­ing doc­u­ment for the client to review and com­plete with any changes or amend­ments. At this point in time a well worded email is the most reli­able method I’ve found, and it’s easy for clients to respond. I’ve seen some web-based solu­tions and I could make a fancy inter­ac­tive PDF form, but peo­ple are so busy if they can just reply to an email, or pick up the phone it’s done! From expe­ri­ence, it’s a good move to con­firm any ver­bal instruc­tions back to the client in an email.

We have a pol­icy of keep­ing our clients happy! I don’t mean to sound patro­n­is­ing here but if I’ve pre­sented my ideas for a design and the client feed­back requires changes, unless they are going to fun­da­men­tally harm their brand I’m happy to make changes. I say this as I’ve heard sto­ries of design­ers refus­ing to make changes to ‘their’ design.  I’ll always state my opin­ion if I don’t think the changes are going to work, but essen­tially this is a client focused rela­tion­ship. I believe that the rela­tion­ship is more impor­tant than the work. Peo­ple remem­ber how you make them feel so if I’m flex­i­ble with the designs I present, the client remem­bers me as some­one who is easy to work with. My favorite ver­sions of a logo have not always made the cut, but the client has loved a dif­fer­ent ver­sion because that’s the one that res­onates with them, either way that’s good for me. One of the big issues that divides opin­ion is hav­ing a pre­scribed num­ber of revi­sions. I can under­stand why it’s used but I’ve never gone with it per­son­ally. If a client is being plain awk­ward or inde­ci­sive, I’d rather com­mu­ni­cate any con­cerns to them and work out a revised way of pro­gress­ing with an agreed end point and a revised quote if nec­es­sary, rather than say ‘sorry’ you’ve used up your quota any­thing I do now will cost ‘X’ on top of the ini­tial quote. another method we have used to nav­i­gate this tricky topic is to charge mile­stone pay­ments. This also helps cash-flow if a job ends up in limbo or on proof indefinitely.

To see exam­ples of Pro Motion Media Graphic Design, visit our website.

Com­ments very welcome!

James