Choosing a designer to work with on your next creative project can be a scary task. After all, you want to find someone that understands your vision but can translate all of your best ideas into something that not only looks beautiful, but serves its function too.

But when you do find the perfect designer to collaborate with, who can do all of the above and more...how do you prepare yourself to work with them - and to take full advantage of their time and talent?

As a designer myself, I’m so excited to share with you my top 5 tips for prepping to work with a designer - bear in mind that every designer will work differently, but this should give you a good headstart:

1. Don’t be afraid to question the process.

Every designer will have a different set of systems and processes that they use when working with their clients. This is for good reason - these systems are in place to help streamline the work that you do together and take full advantage of putting your creative ideas together with the skills of your designer.

That said - do NOT be afraid of asking questions, particularly when you don’t understand something or want something clarifying. A good designer will not be worried or phased by you questioning something and will want to reassure you and ensure that you are happy with the end result. I know that you know your business better than anybody else, so this is something I actively encourage my clients to do. Asking questions will make the end-result of the work we do together better - no doubt about it.

2. But TRUST in the process.

That said - you also need to be comfortable with putting a lot of trust and faith in your designer. They know what they are doing - they have the skills to take your incredible vision and turn your message into something visually amazing.

Trust in your designer - they know what they’re doing, have often trained for many years (and I’m a big believer in that our training never ends!) and they can make decisions for your brand and designs much more objectively than you can. As a designer, I am always invested in my clients and want them to succeed - and the work I do will reflect that.

3. Know WHAT you want.

This might seem a puzzling point - after all, if you’re hiring a designer for something, you might think you know exactly what you want. However - I would encourage you to dig a little deeper. Ask yourself questions you might not have considered before: what is the objective for this piece of work that’s being created? How do you want your dreamy, ideal audience to feel when they see this design (whether it’s your logo, a graphic or your website)? What is the purpose of this work - where will it be used, integrated, etc? What is the larger vision that you have for your business? How does this vision play into the work you want completed?

All of these questions - and many, many more - will help you to discover exactly what you want from the work and will help you to communicate this to your designer more clearly. And the clearer the spec you hand to your designer, the more likely the work you get back at the end will match what you envisioned from the start.

4. Prepare a brand style board.

One of the most useful things you can hand to your designer is a brand style board. Yep, that’s right - I’m giving you an excuse to go Pinterest crazy! Firstly, start off by creating a mind map of different words you’d associate with your brand. Think of feelings you want to evoke with your ideal audience, words that you would use to describe your business and look at the language that your ideal audience use when interacting with your business. Using all of these words, start searching Pinterest one word at a time and add all images that you connect with to a special Brand Style Board. This is an invaluable resource to pass to your designer, because they’ll get a great insight into your favoured styles and will help you communicate what you want much more easily.

5. Bring all your passion + energy into the fold.

This, for me, is the most important thing you can do. Get excited about the work you’re doing together with your designer and bring all of that excitement, passion and incredible energy into the fold. Enjoy the opportunity you have to work with your designer and really appreciate the effort that goes into creating your work. I get so heavily invested in my clients and their work - I truly want them to succeed and hope that my work will help them to do that. When my clients feel the same way and are truly excited by the opportunity to collaborate...it’s a designer’s dream come true.

Please note: This post was first featured on Passion Junkie but is now being republished on the Rachilli blog.

When it comes to standing out in the online world, it’s pretty hard to look unique.

Take a look at a few brands and businesses that are in the same field as you. I bet that preeetty much everywhere you look you’ll find gold textures galore, really hard-to-read text overlaying some obviously-not-stock-but-is-stock photo images and glitter. Glitter everywhere.

Now these are just a select few of my pet peeves (I’ll explain more of why these are a BAD idea to include in your brand another day), but can you see the problem here?

None of these businesses or brands are powerful, because they’re all trying to be the same.

To create a truly powerful brand, you have to accept that you are a creative-minded person, with your own opinions, your own values and your own beliefs. And own the heck out of them.

While there are 3 main actions you can take to build a more powerful brand, I believe that you have to start from within. And by that, I mean dig deep to figure out exactly what matters to you. Ask yourself some of these questions: What do you believe in? What do you stand for? What matters most to you in your work? What message do you want to share with the world? What do you really want to say?

The key to knowing all of what you want to say - and doing it? Don’t be afraid of what other people will think of you.

It’s easy to say you believe in something, but until you start sharing it and injecting all of that goodness into your brand + business at a larger level, I’m sorry - but it means nothing.

Once you know what you want to share with the world, you can start to take action. And that’s where the 3 secrets to a powerful brand step in.

1. Connection

Now I’m talking about true connection, that REAL relationship that you choose to build with somebody - not making friends with everybody you see in Facebook groups. In business, you want to build connections with three types of people:

  1. Your audience. These are the people that value your work, your values and the message you share. Without an audience you have no business. Your audience are the people that become your valued customers, who will shout about you + what you have to say, who will support you and want to learn more from you. And the win-win is that the more value you give, the more that you put out into the world…the more your audience will grow.
  2. Your customers. These are the people that buy from you. In my business, I have two types of customers: my clients (for my 1:1 branding and website design work) and those that purchase my products (my books + courses). These are the most important people in your business. Keep your customers happy and they will turn into adoring fans - over deliver on the experience your customers have with you (from pre-sale to well beyond) and you’ll have an incredibly powerful army of customers who will continually bring more of their friends into the fold - and into your tribe.
  3. People that are in the same field / industry as you - but are further ahead. Jim Rohn is quoted as saying that “You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”. I’ve always loved this quote and I’m (now) fiercely protective of the energy I choose to surround myself with. There are more than 5 people that I love to spend time with, but by also allowing myself the permission to spend time with people further ahead in their business and on their journey than me, I get the chance to learn something new. I don’t pretend to know it all and I love it most when I have something new to learn. By surrounding myself with people that lift me up and inspire me to reach the level they’re at, I get to learn so much - whether it’s around mindset, a new design or development technique, or that really - realising that everyone (even at a super high level) is just a normal person, like me and you.

A few practical ways that you can start connecting more are:

Once you start focusing on connection as one of your primary aims in business, you are one step into creating a more powerful brand. It’s so easy to not focus on building real relationships and focus on the numbers - like building your list, your twitter followers or Facebook page likes. But in the end it’s the true connections you’ve made that will create a long-lasting, long-term difference in your business.

2. Consistency

I’m laughing as I write this one, because this is something I’ve REALLY struggled with. But that said, consistency is one of the most important things you can create in your business.

When you are consistently getting in touch with somebody (not so often that you’re RIGHTINTHEIRFACE 24/7), you start to become familiar. And familiarity is what builds trust. And trust (and credibility) is what makes a member of your audience more likely to become a customer.

Consistency isn’t just sending out your weekly email newsletter (though that will help). Consistency is built into everything that you do as a business and everything that you release into the wild. This might include:

  1. Your Visual Brand. This is everything from your logo (though evolutions of brands are great to see, please don’t change it all the time. A good logo should be timeless and free of gimmicks) through to your colour palette, your typography styles, photography styles (and filters) and more. The more consistent you can keep your visual brand style, the more familiar your audience becomes with you and your brand. If that is visually a bit crazy with loads of patterns - great, but keep it that way. If it’s polished and clean? Great - but keep it that way.
  2. Your Tone of Voice. This is all about the words you use when communicating with your audience and breaking it down even further, can be your language style, writing style and so on. Any point that you communicate with your audience through words, you want to make sure that the tone matches the style you’ve been using for a while. If you don’t eff-and-jeff (swear, for those not from Northern England like myself) then don’t start planting the f-bomb into your sentences. Meanwhile, if that’s your jam then go right ahead and keep swearing. But again: keep it consistent.
  3. Frequency. This is down to when you send out info to your audience, such as your weekly newsletter, “important" social media posts (like launch posts) and so on. If your audience becomes used to seeing your newsletter on a specific day, it’s something they can look forward to. If they don’t know when you’re going to get in touch, you can’t build that sub-conscious excitement and anticipation. Keep it consistent.

Consistency is normally a challenge for anybody - it’s harder than it looks to keep up with a schedule that can easily suck hours out of your normal working week. But the payoff is more than worth the time it takes to implement and consistently communicate with your audience.

Believe me when I say consistently creating content (try saying that fast 10 times!) is one of the biggest challenges for me - but there are a few things that help me personally to cope with that challenge:

  1. PLAN. Yep, this one deserves to be in capitals. Plan, plan and plan some more. By planning what you want to say in advance it makes it a heck of a lot easier to be committed and to follow through. Plan both what you want to say in a broader way by creating an editorial calendar, where you plot what type of content you want to put out, which days and when. I recently got the chance (at long last!) to work with my biz bestie Layla Saad, who helped me figure out how to more powerfully position myself and my work. Part of that work was guiding me to create an editorial calendar and it’s been a HUGE relief to see everything set out in a way that makes sense to my (often kinda crazy) brain. Also take the time to plan out each individual piece of content, so that you know the points you want to cover and don’t go off on mindless rambles. Mind map (or brain fart, as I like to call them) around the topics you want to cover, and then put them in bullet points. You’ll be surprised how much easier it is to create content when you know what you want to cover!
  2. Create a routine. I’m a huge fan of routines. And lists. By combing the two, it’s a creating content consistently match made in heaven. If you create a routine to how you create your content, it will only help you switch into the mindset much quicker. I find that having a specific way that I start writing my written blogs helps. I brain fart (mind map) around the topic I’m covering, pick out the key points and break it down. Then I take the time to get into the headspace (for me that sometimes means meditating, cuddles with my two crazy dogs or popping my favourite classical track on. At the moment it’s The Piano Guys with "Beethoven’s 5 Secrets”) before I sit down and WRITE. And as my wonderful client + friend Kelly Azevedo likes to say - just keep your bum on the chair ’til it’s done.
  3. Stay committed. It’s really hard to keep creating things - particularly when you have a day where you simply can’t be bothered. But stay the course and keep doing it, even when it gets hard. Having a schedule and a content calendar will help, but they mean nothing if you don’t do the work. Find a way to make creating your content fun and it will be a lot easier for you to stay committed.

Once you start building your routine into communicating and displaying your brand consistently to your audience, you’ll notice that your engagement should start to lift. People love consistency as it feels familiar to them - and you can then use it to your advantage, by being inconsistent to really get the attention of your audience at a time outside of the norm.

3. Credibility

In any business, trust is a huge factor in whether someone or not will buy from you. In online business? It’s even more important. We don’t have the advantage that brick-and-mortar stores have by being able to be there, right in front of their customer. Instead, we have to use the previous two points, and many more, to help convince our audience that we are trustworthy, credible and an expert at what we do. The advantage we do have is that we can use many more neat tricks to convince our customers to buy from us…24/7.

Building credibility isn’t something that will happen overnight - it will instead take time and due diligence to build up slowly, over time. If you think about Spiderman or Superman helping their own cities - the trust didn’t arrive straight away, but instead built up over time as they helped more and more people out.

In the same way, you can build credibility and your reputation by being someone that gives back to your community, your audience and your customers. Make sure that every level of interaction that they have with you is top notch and without fault. One simple way of doing this is to create nurture sequences for people that join your email list, so instead of them being thrown into your weekly newsletter, they are welcomed gently into your online tribe.

But remember as well: that nobody is perfect. If you want to build credibility and get your audience to trust you, you need to be real and down to earth with them too. Keep it real, share your struggles AND your achievements and don’t be afraid of being vulnerable. Try to think of a time when you felt more truly connected to one of your favourite online entrepreneurs - I bet you felt reassured and that they were like YOU when they shared where they were truly at in that moment in time.

So there you have it. The 3 secrets to a more powerful brand.

These are things that you can put into action straight away - but results won't necessarily happen overnight. Take the time to implement them properly in your business and you’ll notice a huge difference in the way your audience engages with you and connects with you over time.

I’d love to know - which of these do you think you struggle with most? For me - it’s consistency. Let me know your own in the comments below.

About Rachilli Creative Studio.

Rachilli is a creative studio dedicating to helping create more authentic brands for creative brands & businesses ready to grow deeper roots with their audience & build their business in a more aligned way.

Rachilli is also committed to helping empower other's with chronic illness to carve their own path and create a life & business that works for them and to lead the way by creating a platform for, and being a voice alongside, those with chronic illness in business.

Rachel, the founder, is an award-winning designer and photographer, published logo designer and author, and is dog mama to two - slightly crazy - pups, Storm & Jasper.

My Core Values.

Create with intentional flow.

Grow community through connection.

Be courageously creative.

Ground my work in deeper roots.

Grab my weekly-ish musings and behind the scenes emails below.

My emails will give you behind the scenes insights into my creative business, and, on rare occasions, might include the odd promo for tools + products I use + trust.
You can unsubscribe at ANY time. You can also read my Privacy Policy to find out more about how I use + handle your details (spoiler alert: I don't send spam or sell your data.)

© Copyright 2012 - 2023 · Rachilli Creative Studio · Rachel Shillcock

linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram