7 things to note before hiring a web/graphic designer

Aside from forming my company and Muffin.my, I have some experience in hiring both web and graphic designers. Here I am going to share about what you should know before hiring a designer.

1. What You Pay Is What You Get

This is the most important thing that you must remember. While finding a designer to work for you for the first time, you will get many different quotes from various freelancers or agencies. The price can be as low as RM50/banner (US$14), or as high as RM500/banner (US$140). Based on my experience, unless you are getting a good price by a friend who works as a designer, most of the time cheap work delivers lower quality (or even ugly) design.

2. Never Ask For Free Design

With the amount of graphic designers out there these days, you probably have a friend who works as a designer. If you are thinking about asking for a ‘favor,’ or maybe thought about saying, “Help me design a logo, it’ll be really quick and simple,” don’t. No one should work for free, no matter how close you are to the person (unless it’s your partner?).

I personally negotiate design work with a friend who does work for me, but I never want free labor from them. In the same way that a friend offered to help me do my interior layout for free, I would feel bad to take the offer because she needs to work on it after her daytime job. Imagine you took years to complete a degree, up until midnight doing countless assignments, and when you finally get a degree, people expect for you to work for free. This is rather unfair to them. And because they’re your friend, you can be difficult for them to say no to when you ask for a favor.

3. ‘Graduated From’ Does Matter

I receive a number of resumes when I post classified jobs, and I have found that which university or academy the applicant graduated from actually does matter. There are so many design institutions out there, and to be frank, not all of them provide good quality teaching. From what I see among the portfolios and interviews, I find graduates from The One Academy have nicer and better quality works. I also feel it’s ridiculous when I receive applicants who have no designing background, but ask for a chance to let them ‘try’ to be a graphic designer. Do they think that knowing the basics of Photoshop or Illustrator is sufficient to be a junior graphic designer??

4. Freelancer or Agency ?

Most of the time freelance designers quote cheaper prices than an agency would. Work coming from an agency doesn’t mean better quality, though it should come with certain quality guaranteed. The price quoted by an agency can be double, or even more. It really depends on your network and luck to get a right freelancer with decent pricing and good quality work. Freelance designers can be found at Behance.net, where I have found that their works are rather good. You could also try out freelancer.com, but make sure you check out their ratings first.

5. Choose The Right Style

Every designers have their own design style. There are good designers who can design anything based on client preferences, but it is better that you look through their portfolios first. This way, you can see if the design style is diverse or sticks to one style. For instance, a designer who is used to designing good animation might not be suitable to design beauty-related works.

6. Maintain Good Communication