3 Tips To Get More Out Of Your Design Budget

Why is it that fortune 1000 companies often have beautiful websites, brochures, TV commercials, videos, photography, logos, and other well-designed materials? Quality design portrays a business that is established, credible, and trust worthy. Poor quality design is something that can easily turn off a potential customer, especially when there are competitors with more credible design sales and marketing assets enticing you to choose them.
So why do businesses fail to see the benefits in design or invest properly in design. Why are there so many businesses with poorly designed logos, dated websites, dated marketing materials, and many other design catastrophes? Well there are many reasons, but I believe the number one reason is that it is almost impossible to put a clear-cut ROI value on good design. What is the ROI of an amazing style guide for a brand? How do you measure the impact of design?
Sure there are split tests and you can see the revenue increases after a brand refresh or other design projects, but couldn’t that be a result of better business practices in other areas? Design is incredibly difficult to put a ROI value on. Therefore many cut and dry business owners only want to spend their marketing dollars on things that have tangible ROI numbers like a Google Adwords account or a TV campaign that reaches x number of eye balls.
This blog is meant to help business owners find ways to get more out of design, even if they cannot put an exact dollar value ROI on every design project.

1) Take Design To Heart:

What some of these business owners may fail to realize is that poorly designed materials could be the reason their other marketing or other types of marketing initiatives are failing. My advice to business owners is to think of your brand as the value of your business. In essence, it is the foundation of your business. Therefore, it should be a priority to develop a solid style guide of colors, fonts, images, and logo variations that are both high quality, diverse and long lasting.
Most business owners are competitive. Make sure your branding materials are as good or close to as good as your competitors as possible based on the budget you have for design and branding. Get honest feedback from friends, family, and customers. Most people will try and be your friend and tell you that your design or logo is better but they are just being nice. Try and get the truth out of them. Don’t be upset if friends or other people tell you that your design is inferior to your competitors because that just means you only have improvements to make.

2) Diversify Your Designers:

Developing high quality design assets can be expensive. However, with the right freelance talent it does not necessarily have to be that way.  Additionally, sites like 99designs and other design sites can offer less expensive branding and design work. You might not find the level of quality you would get from a top-notch design agency on these sites, but for many business owners this option could be much better than what they currently have.
My biggest advice to learning how to leverage or utilize design is to hire multiple designers and find many different design options. This has helped me develop a stronger eye for design because having worked with many different designers; I have noticed that some have different styles, strengths, and weaknesses.
A design you might have thought was well orchestrated could actually be closer to a mediocre design asset relative to top-notch talent you cannot afford or simply have not had the luxury of working with. You can’t know what you have never seen.  One way to learn whether you are getting just an average design quality from a project or not is to sample other designers work. Maybe try and earn a proposal from some agencies to see what type of work they have done or what type of work they might do for you.

• Test out sites like 99designs
• Test out freelancers with sites like elance or freelancer.com
• Test out a top notch agency
• Test out designers with different aptitudes and strengths such as web design, Photoshop/illustrator, print, video and more.

Once you have compared multiple designers of different aptitudes, experience levels, price ranges, and other variations you will start to realize what type of design might be a good fit for your business.

3) Plan Out Your Objectives Beforehand:

Design is subjective. There are an infinite number of possibilities for every design project. Simply shooting down your designer’s ideas with no helpful feedback will get you nowhere. If you do not offer helpful design feedback when engaging with designers you could wind up wasting your money, overpaying, or having them run away half way through the project because you are just too difficult to deal with.
Plan out what you want to accomplish with your design project that might help guide your designer in the right direction. This will help you get the most out of your designers work. Showing a designer other sites or examples of work could also help your designers move in the right direction. Another option would be to sketch out or use a tool like Quirktools to create a basic wireframe, or any possible information architecture asset.
Keep in mind that design is a very collaborative process. Therefore you, or someone that you trust to put in charge of the design process will have to be very involved in helping guide the design in the right direction. A good rule of thumb is to expect to put just as much effort into the design project as the designers that you hire put in. This might not always be necessary, but if you plan for it and do not have to put in a lot of time consider that a success. In many cases you will have to put in that level of a time commitment so plan for the worst and hope for the best.