4 points to consider when judging your designer’s work

I mentioned in a prior article that one of the top questions I get is, “What is a magalog?”

Assuming the person goes forward with having one created, my question to them is, “How will you know if I’ve given you a great magalog?” In a broader sense, how do you, as a client, judge any work your designer gives you? (In this case, I’m talking about print design, not online.)

Most of the clients I work with on a regular basis are very smart and very experienced when it comes to marketing. They’ve been around a long time and have a great sense of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to copy, design, offers, pricing, when to mail, etc. Another way of saying it is that they know their target audience really well.

But some clients have little experience in direct marketing. They know they need help, but they’re not quite sure if what they end up looking at from their designer will really work.

To a certain extent, you won’t be able to fully judge your designer’s work until you’ve tested the material. (And to be fair, success or failure is dependent on more than just design.) But there are some things you can do before setting your marketing material free into the cold and crowded mailboxes of the world.

1. Get my free book, Increase Sales & Build Deeper Connections: How To Get Prospects To Pay Attention To The Story They Want And Need To Hear Before They Buy, on the MagalogGuy.com homepage. Sorry to jump in first with a shameless plug, but this book covers aspects of magalog design. By knowing some of the things that go into the design of magalogs (and other types of marketing material), you’ll have a better sense of what to look for when a PDF proof arrives in your inbox.

If you’re not seeing some of the things I mention in the guide on your proofs, it doesn’t necessarily mean your project will fail and you chose the wrong designer. What it will allow you to do is bring up some points with your designer so you can better discuss why certain things were or were not done.

2. Don’t judge things too much on your personal preferences. The fact that you may not personally like the color blue, for example, isn’t terribly relevant. That’s hard for some client’s to hear, but your marketing material isn’t designed for you… it’s designed for your audience.

Now, if you have some study that shows your target market hates blue, blue is out. If you have a color scheme for your business or product that doesn’t lend itself to blue, again, blue is out.

Most designers I know don’t pick random colors and certainly don’t pick colors to annoy the client. When there is no color scheme that needs to be used as a foundation, your typical designer is going to go with certain colors that he or she knows will work well based on experience with other projects. Or they’ll choose certain colors or color combinations that reflect a certain feeling you want to put forth. Sometimes a significant photo on the cover might dictate the color palette.

3. Show your designer samples of things you like or don’t like. One of the biggest mistakes clients make is waiting until after seeing a draft of a design to start saying things like, “Oh… forgot to mention… I really dislike ______.” Ideally your designer will ask about your likes and dislikes at the start of the project, but don’t be shy speaking up if he or she doesn’t ask.

The reason this step is important is because, as any designer who has been around can tell you, some clients will take a PDF proof and say they don’t like it at all when they actually just dislike one little thing. But that one little thing is so important to them, it causes them to dismiss the whole thing as bad. If that little “thorn” had been known ahead of time, it would have saved you and the designer valuable time.

By the way, I’ve run into plenty of clients who hated the idea of showing me (or any other designer) samples of stuff they’ve used in the past because they hated it and didn’t want that to influence the new designer. But that’s the wrong way to look at things… you want it to influence your designer!

By showing the designer something you’ve used that bombed or made you sick to your stomach just looking at it, you’re helping your designer dismiss any ideas he or she might have had that had similar characteristics.

4. Is it easy to read? Ah… now we’re at the heart of direct market layout and design: Did the designer make the copy easy to read? While this can be subjective, more often than not it’s going to be pretty clear whether the designer has hit the mark or not. This includes not only the font choice and font size, but white space, leading, kerning, tracking and a host of other issues. You may not know the “rules” behind some of that terminology, but you’re going to know if you can read the thing easily or not.

Sometimes clients ask the near-impossible: Fitting way too much copy on way too little space. At a certain point, there’s only so much a designer can do and then it’s up to you to either cut copy or pay for more space. For example, your magalog may need to expand from eight pages to twelve. Bottom line: Your designer will do his or her best, but you might have to face the reality that things aren’t going to fit the way you thought they might. If it’s not going to work as-is, it’s time for Plan B.

Like just about any topic, we could spend pages and pages discussing this in more details. But for now I simply wanted to highlight some key points so that your projects can go as smoothly as possible.