Finding a designer:

If you aren’t lucky enough to have an onsite designer, check the local chapter of AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts), or if you work at or around a university, you can usually solicit a student to do some freelance work for you. Sites like craigslist or Agaveblue are great places to find or post freelance jobs as well.

Initial stage of working with a designer:

Designers are notoriously hard to work with. Here are a few tips to make your interaction with them more beneficial for the both of you. The reason that designers are so hard to work with is that their clients never say exactly what they want. The best way to overcome this obstacle is to bring as many examples of things that you like – Cut out advertisements from magazines, bring print-outs from the internet, if you like the color of your coffee mug, bring it with you to show your designer. As a designer, I would love to be in the position to have too many resources to design around as opposed to nothing. I know that you will be happier with the outcome if I can pick and choose elements of things you like rather than fishing in the dark. So now that you have provided your designer with a treasure-trove of insight into what you like, does that ensure that you will like the results? Not necessarily, but I can guarantee it will be closer to what you want.

Review stage:

This is the make-it or break-it moment. The designer has taken all of your input and put it all together. You are either thrilled with the outcome, or it just doesn’t seem right. If it doesn’t seem right, then you need to communicate exactly what isn’t working for you. Sometimes that is a hard thing to do, but rather than just saying this doesn’t look right, try to be as specific as possible.

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I hope that this will help bridge the gap between you and your designer, you can’t be afraid to say what you want, but you should also try be open to the ideas and the feedback the designer is providing you; they have a vested interest in making you look the best because their reputation as a designer is on the line.

Have you checked out Del.icio.us yet? If you’re late to the game as I am, let me clue you in… Del.icio.us is a “social bookmarking” site, which basically means that you have an online repository for all your bookmarks, with the ability to see who else has the same site saved as you, and also to browse their entire bookmark catalog. The benefit of this might not be immediately apparent, but this is a great source of inspiration. Say you have a weird page of avant-garde Russian constructivist propaganda posters bookmarked that you stumbled upon a year ago. You can instantly see that 62 other people have the same site bookmarked. Most likely than not, the people have this site bookmarked have some of the same interests as you, so take a minute and browse their bookmarks, you might discover something new and right up your alley. Even if you don’t take advantage of the “social” aspect of del.icio.us, you’ll have a browser independent list of all of your important bookmarks. Check out my del.icio.us if you want to try it out before you sign up. (It’s free to sign up by the way.)