Like all processes there are different stages in the design process. It is likely that every designer has their own process. But there will certainly be some consistencies between what most designers do.
There are certain steps that I follow for most projects. No matter how big or small. These are:
- Initial consultation and brief
- Preliminary design
- Rollout – making all the assets
- Finalising and file sending.
I will break down each step to give a better understanding of what this all means.
Final step
We are now right at the end of the process. Together we have done great things and the document is almost perfect. Now let’s so the finalising.
Finalising
This is not like the revising that happened in the preliminary design phase. Seriously! This is much more subtle. This is simple tweaks. This is things like: fixing that typo everyone missed, changing the order of some bullet points so that it reads better, swapping out an image, or replacing a sentence after someone else has had a thorough look over the document. The changes are so very subtle you might be able to ‘play spot the difference’ between the end of the rollout phase and the end of the revising stage. However, it won’t look like a new document or have a different structure or anything. That is definitely outside of scope.
Back end finalising
I will do many different things in the back end of the document. Mostly I am just making sure that all the final assets I am creating are exactly what you are after. The obvious things would be making print files print quality. Web files will be optimised. Any PDFs will have clickable links and fillable fields if required. None of these things will be visible. It is my internal process to make sure I deliver a top product.
File sending
There will be two types of file sending. One will be the assets as we agreed upon. So that is the actual images you put on social media or web. Or the actual file you send to the printer. Or the actual PDF that you send out. But if agreed, I will also send you the original source files. I normally package everything and put it into a zip file and put it on Dropbox. But I am flexible with this. I truly believe that you own all the files that I create for you when paid by you. So yeah, I send the files. However, I am not an archive so make sure you download a copy of the files and keep them safe.
This is the end of the project, we can check what I delivered against the brief.
Payment
I will normally send an invoice with the files. I am flexible here and I will follow your standard billing process to make things easy for you. I can get paid in so many different ways. But we will have discussed this at the start. It is at this stage though that I will ask for payment.
Done.
I would love to get any feedback from you on the process and might ask for a review or testimonial. And, I would love to use your project as a portfolio item or case study. While I will never send your files to anyone else, ever, I might use some of the pages or images in my portfolio. If you want, I can even do a whole Behance post on it, let me know.
We can tick it all off as fully completed. Job well done.
