Working with Clients. What Questions to Ask
Working with clients
Working with clients is vital for a freelancer, since we don’t rely on agents or managers. The idea behind writing the Working With Clients series was to share my experience starting from scratch as a graphic design student and becoming a freelancer, lacking the experience and expertise at first, but gaining trust and client-base in the end.
Asking Questions
Presuming logos are attractive and smart, they are supposed to drag viewer’s and potential customer’s attention to the company. 90% of the attraction is basic psychology and therefore all of the interactions between the sign and the customer desire lies in between the emotions.
As a logo designer, one has to think like a customer and therefore start with the emotional approach. What emotions, should the logo attract, what should one think when looking at it.
It is very important for a company (band, person, etc.) to have a positive image in terms of the products (services, etc.) they offer (for example rock bands shouldn’t be nice).
When designing a logo for a new customer, it’s extremely hard to do that right away, because it’s never possible to create an image of a company you don’t know. Best solution would be spending time within the company, but obviously that is rarely possible. So all you have is questions you can ask.
My enquiry for new clients includes questions about:
- colors to be assosiated (and usually I don’t go with the colors he presents, I derive from them emotionally)
- images that you want or don’t want to be assosiated with your logo?
- message that the company brings
- target market
Interpreting the Answers
Those questions are a good start for those wanting to create new logos and branding images. After the answers are a given a good way to interpret those would be an assosiative chain, or a tag cloud or anything alike. Go with it in the same way as when someone tells you banana and you think yellow.
If the message that the company brings is “JOY” think laughter, then think smiles, then think smiley face. Expand this a little and you’ll get some ideas.
Overall the logo and branding design process is a very mysterious process that works very much like psychology, with the same vagueness and uniqueness for each person. Once a designer gets a grasp of it, it’s hard to let go.
I hope the article was useful to you, take care and see you next time!
