Graphic Design Business Ideas and Tips

By Eric Miller, About.com

Get the Word Out

When starting or attempting to grow a graphic design business, a key factor is finding clients. Unless you are making a living off of personal ventures, you won’t have an income without them. There are many ways to market your company, from blogging to networking to word-of-mouth. Once you’ve impressed a client with your design skills and business sense, it’s amazing how word can get around, and there are ways to encourage it.

• Growing Your Business Through Word-of-Mouth
• How to Create an Email Newsletter
• Create a Business Card
• Get Your Credit Line
• Graphic Design Blogs

Create a Portfolio

When you make contact with a potential client, often the first thing they will want to see is your portfolio. Your portfolio is an extremely important business tool, as many companies will choose a designer based on their previous work, and how that work is presented. Don’t worry if you don’t have “enough experience” to show in your portfolio… student work or personal projects can impress just as much. There are several options, each with different benefits and varied cost and time commitment.

• Types of Graphic Design Portfolios
• Building a Website Portfolio
• Building a PDF Portfolio

Set Your Rates

While it may be difficult to figure out hourly and flat rates, there are processes you can follow that make it easier. Remember, unless you feel you can’t land a job otherwise, you don’t need to give a client the project cost at your first meeting. Take some time to decide if you want to charge by the hour or a flat rate, compare the job to previous jobs, and get back to the client with an accurate estimate.

• Hourly vs. Flat Rates
• How to Determine Your Hourly Rate
• How to Determine Flat Rates

Meeting with Clients

When you hold a client meeting, go in knowing what information you would like to gather. By getting a full understanding of the scope of the project, you can create an outline, an accurate estimate, and ultimately prepare the contract.

• What to Ask Clients in Meetings
• How to Create a Project Outline
• What to Include in a Contract

Managing Projects

Once you have started a graphic design project, there are ways to properly manage it and stay organized. For starters, keep in constant contact with your client and follow the project schedule so the job is finished on deadline. There are plenty of software packages that will help you, from to-do lists to billing.

• Project Management Software
• The Benefits of Time Tracking
• Time Tracking Software

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- http://graphicdesign.about.com/od/career/ss/business_ideas.htm

Who Do You Design For: Clients or Users?

- By Brian Haught

If you close your eyes and think back to the first design fundamentals class you ever took hopefully you remember the instructor saying,”When beginning a design ask yourself who is your audience? If you don’t know who you are designing for then how can you design anything at all?”

Fast forward to the present. Now you are a freelance designer, you have met with the client, discussed what they want and agreed to do the job. Suddenly the client sends you a sketch of a horrible monstrosity of a design so unholy your eyes begin to burn. The client attached instructions that do not resemble the previous discussions and break every rule you can imagine.

Now ask yourself, “Who are you designing for?” By definition, your job is to communicate a message via images and text. But, as a businessperson your goal must be to meet the requests of the client. If you go against the client’s explicit requests and produce a user-centric design, oddly enough you’ll have an unhappy client. Now the flip side of the coin. If you cooperate, lay down your sword, turn off the grids and produce what the client has demanded, the design will fail and in turn you will fail. The bad design will always come back like Rocky and smash you right in the face.

I still feel there is no right answer, but all I can do is plead my case. This is the very definition of a catch-22 and this 800 pound gorilla shows no signs of going away. I get down on all fours and beg the client not to demand drop shadows and convince them that whitespace is a beautiful thing and is not to be confused with wasted space.

About the author

After several years as a corporate slave and servant to the public Brian Haught got a wild hair and went to college. Today he landed a position as Art Director for a local company where he oversees and implement the print and online advertising. He manages to do several freelance jobs a year and find time to play video games. You know the important stuff. All in all he is just a guy who likes design, art and anything “techy”.

Note

This post is one of the finalists of guest author contest on smashingmagazine.com.