How to Know You Are Hiring the Right Graphic Designer

How to Know You Are Hiring the Right Graphic Designer

Hiring a graphic designer can be a challenging process.

With so many options, how do you know which fits your project and needs?

This comprehensive guide will walk you through the key things to look for when evaluating the right graphic designer to ensure you find someone reliable, skilled, and aligned with your goals.

Define What Kind of Designer You Need

Before beginning your search, clearly define the specifics of the role you aim to fill. This includes:

Type of Designer

There are various types of graphic designers specialising in different areas:

• Print designers – focus on projects destined for print, such as brochures, magazines, posters, packaging, etc. They know CMYK colour spaces, image resolutions, bleeds, and other print-specific requirements.
• Web/digital designers – have expertise in designing for screens and digital media like websites, mobile apps, banner ads, email newsletters, social media graphics, etc. They know best practices for UX/UI principles, responsive design, RGB colour, and web design.
• Motion graphics designers – specialise in creating animated graphics and visual effects for video, film, TV, web, and other types of dynamic digital media.
• Branding designers – help companies define and establish their brand identity and style through logo design, colour palettes, typography, messaging, visuals, and more.
• Illustration designers – focus on conceptualising and creating custom drawings, characters, scenes, patterns, and other illustrations to communicate ideas and stories visually.

Establishing the speciality you need upfront will help target your search and ensure you find someone proficient in the required domain.

Design Style You Want

Beyond their speciality, graphic designers have unique aesthetic styles and creative approaches. When searching, pay attention to aspects like:

• Color palettes – Bright and vibrant? Muted? Monochromatic? Complementary or contrasting hues? Colour choice impacts mood, emotion, and message.
• Imagery styles – Minimalist? Surreal? Abstract? Photo-based? Black and white or full colour? Illustrative or photographic?
• Typography preferences – Serif, sans serif, display, handwritten, decorative, grotesque, transitional, slab serif? The type also conveys tone.
• Layout/composition styles – Symmetrical and grid-based? Asymmetrical and freeform? Dense or airy? Geometric and structured? Organic and natural?
• Conceptual approaches – Literal or metaphorical? Representative or symbolic? Abstract or concrete? Humorous or serious? Provocative or mild?

Select a designer whose existing portfolio and style align with your aesthetic taste and creative vision for the project.

Research Designer Credentials, Skills and Experience

Once you've defined the specifics of the role, dive deeper into researching individual designers' backgrounds to evaluate their credentials, competencies, and proven track record.

Educational Background

Formal design education and training indicate that the designer understands established principles and techniques. Some things to look for include:

• Design degrees – Many have undergraduate or graduate degrees in graphic design or related fields like advertising, web, UX/UI, illustration, animation, game design, etc.
• Portfolio schools – Specialized non-degree programs focused entirely on developing professional portfolios to prepare students for design careers.
• Self-taught – Some talented designers have built robust portfolios without formal education. Don't automatically discount them.

Regardless of path, the quality of their portfolio is the best test of ability. Education builds a foundation, but practical application cements skill.

Tools and Technology Proficiency

The design relies heavily on software and tools. Ensure designers have expertise in relevant technologies such as:

• Adobe Creative Cloud – Industry standard programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign for print and digital design work.
• Photo/video editing – For any visual media manipulation and production needs.
• Coding/development skills – HTML/CSS competency is critical for web design. Understanding JavaScript, CMS platforms like WordPress, module frameworks like Bootstrap, and the basics of web hosting environments allows fuller-service web design capabilities.
• Animation/motion graphics tools – After Effects, Premiere Pro, Animate CC, etc. for motion-based projects.
• Office productivity software – Familiarity with Microsoft Office programs demonstrates adaptability. Google Workspace skills are also applicable.

These core software/tech skills empower the designer with the digital tools to successfully execute most modern design projects.

How do you know beforehand if a potential new hire is proficient with these tools?

Next to their resume, implementing skill assessment software can be helpful as it can provide objective insights into a designer’s proficiency with various tools and technologies.

Years of Experience

Look at potential hires' experience levels:

• Overall years in the industry – Generally, 5+ years of experience is advisable for complete reliability, versatility, and familiarity with the business process. However, don't discount talented up-and-comers with less experience who show immense creative potential.
• Years specialising in your specific type of project – Someone with 10+ years overall experience but only one year of experience in website design may not be the best fit to design your corporate website. Find designers with expertise specifically tailored to your niche project type.
• Range of experience across various industries/clients – Diverse experience with different types of projects, visual challenges, budgets, audiences and industries leads to broader creative perspectives. Look for transferable skills from their past work that apply to your unique project goals.

Evaluating experience level provides insight into how readily a designer can translate technical and creative vision into reality within limitations.

Assess Professionalism and Process

Beyond pure design talent, you want to partner with reliable, communicative professionals who instil confidence and help achieve business objectives through a thoughtful, creative process. So, when hiring a graphic designer, perform a PI Cognitive Assessment to evaluate potential candidates' cognitive abilities and problem-solving skills.

Portfolio Presentation

A designer's portfolio reveals much about their professional standards. Seek out:

• Well-organised – Sections and project groupings are easy to navigate, indicating an orderly working system. Shows care put into a showcase of abilities.
• Consistent branding – The portfolio employs cohesive visual branding, logo work, style and messaging that reinforce capabilities.
• Case studies/Descriptions – More than pretty pictures. Well-articulated case studies explain each project's context, challenges, solutions and results. Demonstrates strategic thought processes and business considerations.
• Applicable examples – Projects, visuals and descriptions directly relate to the type of work you need help with. This proves hands-on experience in your niche.
• Visual presentation – The visuals and graphics show imagination, technique and design principles that inspire confidence in skill level.

If the portfolio looks messy, dated or amateurish, it instils doubt. A robust and neatly presented design portfolio conveys attention to quality.

References and Testimonials

Seek designers who can provide solid references and positive testimonials from past clients:

• Case study references – Designers who transparently provide real client names and project details for work examples enable you to cross-check and directly investigate their claims about past work.
• Client testimonials – Pre-packaged client endorsements with detailed, enthusiastic commentary about working relationships provide third-party credibility. However, references you check personally outside prepared materials hold a heavier weight.
• Repeat business – If a designer attracts the same clients for multiple projects over extended periods, it demonstrates reliable service and results that foster ongoing trust-based business relationships.

These signals help verify talent and temperament. Design skills can be subjective, but positive client experiences establish confidence.

Outsourcing and Collaboration Approach

Most designers work with contractual creative partners like photographers, illustrators, developers and writers to provide full-service offerings under one roof. Understand their creative network:

• Outsourcing process – How do they manage outsourced contributors? What is the vetting process? Do they have trusted, established teams or pick people project-by-project? Details build trust in quality control oversight.
• Collaboration skills – Design is highly collaborative. CREATIVE A designer who communicates promptly, welcomes feedback, problem-solves constructively, and facilitates efficient teamwork leads to better outcomes.
• Credit and compensation practices – Ethical, consistent attribution and compensation procedures for collaborating contributors reflect professional integrity. These relationships and incentives often yield higher quality output benefiting clients.

Evaluating these dynamics provides insights into working style, ethics and priorities and how well they align with your organisational approach.

Validate Pricing and Process Transparency

Hiring any service provider means investing money – often a significant amount – so full transparency around pricing and process is essential upfront to set expectations and enable budget planning.

Pricing Models

Graphic design pricing takes varied forms:

• Hourly rates – Designer charges per hour based on an agreed scope of work. It gives you maximum flexibility for iterative changes and additions but can allow inefficiencies. Typical agency rates range from $50-$150+/hour.
• Project quotes – If you describe your needs, the designer provides a fixed project price for estimated hours. It is more predictable, but change orders can add costs.
• Package deals – Bundled pre-set packages like “Basic Branding Package” or “10-page Website with 10 Stock Photos”. It makes it simple to get general investment ideas but may lack customisation.
• Value-based pricing – Price directly correlates to the perceived value of outcomes. This favours designers, less so clients lacking full awareness of market rates.
• Retainers – Paying an upfront, non-refundable deposit for allocated blocks of a designer’s time/resources. Provides commitment to then do actual project work at fixed rates.
• Royalties – The designer earns a percentage commission on ongoing profits. Rare except for high-value intellectual property like iconic logos (e.g. Nike Swoosh)

Ideally, get multiple quotes against your defined requirements to evaluate fair market value for budgeting properly.

Design Process Breakdown

Transparency in typical design process phases and what is included are equally essential to fair pricing. Standard stages:

1. Consultation – Discuss brand identity goals, target audience, project specifications, technical needs, aesthetic direction and other starting requirements to frame the scope of work.
2. Research – Immerse in research on your industry, competitors, styles, trends, and visuals to spur creative conceptualisation.
3. Concept Development – Initial first-round visual concepts, layout options, and creative directions to capture look and feel, as well as a messaging strategy for feedback selection and refinement.
4. Revisions – Taking feedback on initial concepts to refine and progress selected designs through a set number of included revision rounds (typically 2-3).
5. Production – Finalizing visuals and taking approved design elements into actual production work, including purchasing stock images, illustrations, copywriting, coding websites, etc.
6. Testing/Launch – For digital projects, especially testing across environments and devices, fixing bugs, tweaking performance, SEO optimisation, integrating analytics, setting up domain/hosting, migration of data, etc.
7. Post-launch Support – Many designers offer retained support packages after launch to help update content, make minor aesthetic changes, provide optimisation tips, troubleshoot issues, etc., for months.

Knowing deliverables, touchpoints and responsibilities across each milestone demystifies the process so you can validate fair scoping for your budget.

Assess Designer-Client Rapport

Like any relationship, the interpersonal dynamic between designer and client can profoundly impact collaboration success. Be alert for red flags versus green lights.

Red Flags

👎

• Lack of interest in brand goals – They don't inquire about business objectives, audience needs or success metrics.
• Overbearing style – Unwilling to adapt conceptual directions to client's aesthetic tastes or brand style guide limitations.
• Poor communication – Hard to get ahold of, responding days later, if at all. Provides bare minimum project updates only when asked.
• Negative client feedback – Consistent past client complaints about missed deadlines, inflexible terms, condescending attitude or weak service mentality.
• Portfolio inconsistencies – Shows exceptional work done by teams they don't credit, raising doubts on actual individual capabilities relevant to you.

Green Flags

👍👍

• Active listening skills – Asks thoughtful questions about brand and project goals, target customers, pain points and desired outcomes.
• Creative instincts – Provides ideas about distinctive visual concepts and style directions tailored to your brand identity, not just generic commodity design.
• Clear communication – Reaches out frequently with progress updates and creative feedback requests to collaborate smoothly in a loop of ongoing dialogue.
• Glowing client reviews – Rave reviews praise creative design talent, project management prowess, strategic perspective, work ethic, and supportive responsiveness.
• Go-getter spark – Exhibits infectious energy and confidence to take the initiative, drive projects forward, and overcome obstacles creatively to achieve defined success markers.

This dance of designer-client chemistry heavily influences the quality of the journey and destination. Pay close attention to how interactions feel.

Confirm Scope Alignment

Before hiring any vendor, always clarify the scope of work and requirements at both ends to lock mutual expectations, capacities and limitations.

Designer Capacity

• Bandwidth – Are they currently available in-house or via trusted freelance partners to take on your project with the assets, time, and focus it demands in the timeframe you need? Or is their workload fully saturated?
• Legacy support – For ongoing visual branding needs, do they have support models to continue helping you execute in-house design updates as creative needs evolve down the road?
• Team scalability – Can they flex up/down to tackle more extensive or complex creative undertakings as your business grows beyond the initial project scope? Vet their models to hand off work across wider agency teams or external networks to meet needs.

Mapping their present situation and future contingencies clarifies whether they can support your ambitions.

Client Capabilities

Equally, designers need transparency from you about limitations and must-haves like:

• Audience specifics – Details about target demographics, psychographics, location, languages, accessibility needs, multicultural nuances and other granular contextual insights that shape design decisions. Not vague generic “make it pop for millennials!” demands.
• Brand guidelines – For branding extensions, existing visual systems with established graphic standards, style guides, logos, colour palettes, image libraries and mandatory messaging regulations or restrictions.
• Technical specifications – I defined WCAG compliance needs, site schemas/navigation maps, 3rd party integrations, animation sequences, video content plans, page layout quantities, product display requirements, etc., to enable accurate quotes and production planning.
• Internal review processes – Decision maker chain of command, required stakeholder approval cycles and feedback mechanisms that govern the process.
• Legal limitations – Relevant legal clearances around trademarks, rights usage, licensed content and other intellectual property factors bound to compliance.

FRAMEWORKS Enabling designers’ access to underlying strategic frameworks ensures better contextual outcomes. Garbage in, garbage out.

Perfect scope alignment minimises painful mid-stream course corrections down the line. Do your diligence.

Validate Specialised Niche Quals

While stellar creative talent and baseline competencies are imperative in any graphic designer, specialised additional niche capabilities may further tip scales in their favour if particularly relevant to your niche industry or audience needs.

Cultural/Regional Experience

If targeting specific cultural demographics or geographic regions with your brand messaging, prior demonstrated expertise designing for those spaces is highly preferential. Relevant facets include:

• Language fluency – For non-English locales like Mexico, China, etc., the ability to smoothly interface in native tongues aids in more contextual outcomes. Transcreation skills translate messaging resonantly across cultural nuances native speakers intrinsically understand.
• Visual + iconography – Deep familiarity with adapting graphics to embed symbols, colours, figures, styles and compositional layout norms that resonantly align with cultural visual languages and artistic heritage.
• Adapting tone + humour – Knowing how to strike the right conceptual tones, humility, enthusiasm or wit that aligns with values like modesty, honour, adventure or irreverence native to targeted regional mindsets and worldviews.
• Celebrity/hero familiarity – Leveraging celebrities, leaders, heroes, and prominent figures popularly inspiring and admired, specifically within cultures, shows tactical awareness through association within tribes.
• Religious/historical fluency – In regions like Latin America and the Middle East, anchoring visual narratives in shared history, traditions and religious allegories unites communities powerfully around common symbolic knowledge.

This form of socio-anthropological immersion presents native authenticity and thoughtfulness.

Subject Matter Expertise

Additionally, genuine personal passion and interest in specific activities, industries or causes helps designers connect target communities empathetically. Case examples:

• Gamer designers can seamlessly apply gaming vernacular, character archetypes, and plot devices into branding for gaming leagues, conventions, video game launches, and esports events.
• Outdoorsy designers who are frequently out hiking tend to compose authentic visual narratives around connection with nature for brands like outdoor gear companies, conservation groups, parks services, etc., informed by lived familiarity with those worlds.
• Sports fan designers – truly invested in loss and victory every season with their home teams can encode that team loyalty ethos into logos, posters, commercials and swag for sports institutions wanting to rally fellow fans.
• Cause-driven designers – who volunteer to walk dogs at the local animal shelter in their free time or have beloved pets of their own typically produce more evocative life-saving branding campaigns for animal welfare groups rooted in genuine pathos.

Passionate insider resonance amplifies authentic signalling power to communities that implicitly detect it.

Style Guidelines

To steer visual design directions, create a style guide reference capturing aesthetic considerations like:

• Imagery – Types of photographs, illustrations, or graphic styles that align with brand identity and target audience interests are required. Plus, any legally approved or restricted images.
• Colour palette – Pinpoint exact hex colour codes and when/how they should be used – accent colours vs backgrounds, coloured typography, gradients, etc.
• Typography – Selected compatible font families and sizes that reinforce brand personality via visual language. Guidance on typographic hierarchy distinguishing headings vs. body text vs. captions.
• Compositional framework – Visual organisation and grid systems, ideal content density, white space expectations, modular layout components, responsive adaptations for different devices.
• Texture palette – Links to approved background textures, patterns, icons and embellishment graphics correlating to style.
• No-go zones – Explicit exclusions or restrictions around imagery, graphics, icons, shapes, symbols or compositions prohibited due to legal, cultural offensiveness, or ethical branding reasons.

Using an inspiration style guide keeps visual evaluations more impartial by defining an approved creative playing field upfront rather than moving target vagueness.

Measurement Criteria

Beyond just style preferences, map design outcomes back to core business objectives by outlining metrics like:

• Brand imprint effectiveness – Does it quickly/memorably establish intended brand identity attributes – professional, playful, cutting-edge, traditional, elegant, bold, understated, approachable, exclusive, etc?
• Recall triggers – Does styling creatively build future recognisability and visual consistency, allowing easy identification of our brand by target customers amidst competitors?
• Emotional impact – Does it spark positive, compelling emotional connections – excitement, intrigue, sentimentality, security, belonging, fear of missing out (FOMO) – that motivates commercial actions?
• Social media virality potential – Does it contain captivating or dramatic elements, spurring viewers to share with peers for exponential organic reach organically?
• Comprehensibility – Does messaging come across clearly to diversified audiences without confusion? Are they supported by visual metaphor associations between imagery and meaning?

Outlining benchmarks for success this way provides helpful decision-making filters beyond just admiring designs in a siloed creative vacuum. Evaluate how well options functionally deliver on business performance indicators, ultimately funding creativity in the first place.

Final Review Process

Before contractual commitments, build in a final presentation review across stakeholder teams, allowing questioning of proposed designers under more formalised conditions.

Creative Pitch Expectations

As the potential client, take an active role in setting presentation briefing to cover elements like:

• Case study walkthrough – Pick 1-2 past projects from portfolios resonating with your goals and have designers detail research specifics, conceptualisation, client collaboration, production, and results.
• Your project outline – Designers will give you their understanding of brand identity goals, audience insights, visual directions and success metrics as discussed. Shows listening acuity.
• Proposed creative concepts – Initial visual concepts, mock-ups and style tile samples tailored to your project demonstrating how they would approach bringing your brand identity to life visually.
• Questions – Solicit their advice on project elements they may approach differently from assumptions submitted in the creative brief if given an expanded design license.
• Pricing – Ask designers to provide a detailed project plan scoping work in phases with action steps, responsibilities split, schedules and budget breakdown by phase to enable price benchmark comparisons.

This mix validates strategic sensibilities and creativity under impromptu pressure before committing budgets and brands long-term into designers' hands.

360 Stakeholder Reviews

The presentation offers a forum for rounded perspectives before decision autonomy falls squarely on you as lead project owner.

• Colleague evaluations – Peer viewpoints are identifying strengths/growth areas the primary decision maker may unconsciously overlook, given their closer involvement.
• Team buy-in – Allows those impacted to collaborate closely and cross-functionally on marketing campaigns, content production, IT integrations, e-commerce, etc., to feel heard, securing increased engagement down the line.
• Critical skillset reviews – Relevant specialists, like coders, photographers, animators, etc., can validate or raise concerns about the technical competencies proposed.
• Executive considerations – Leadership legibility checks ensure creative plans align with overarching business directions beyond isolated departmental project goals.
• Audience panel feedback – Small consumer test groups judging apparent creative appeal, emotional resonance, and intent generation.

Enabling well-rounded objective input from all business angles minimises blindspots and maximises feature-benefit realisation.

Conclusion

Finding the right graphic design partner capable of intuitively translating brand uniqueness into visual communications potently and reliably poses challenges.

Taking an impartial, structured approach to evaluating designer competencies, chemistry, capabilities and cultural resonance against well-defined creative needs and metrics stacks conditions for discovering ideal symbiotic partnerships poised to convert imaginative vision into commercial success creatively.

Trust the process detailed here as your guide, stay emotionally detached but creatively curious assessing options, listen to business instincts where objective data falls short, and the designer fit to spark greatness already lies ahead, waiting to meld missions.

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