How To Speak “Graphic Designer” for Credit Unions
Over the past 12 years of my personal career and the accumulative experience of my team, we have found one thing to be constant. Technology creates confusion.
Other than the agency, I also own and run an internet marketing and design company for about 10 years. About 6 years ago I met up with an old colleague and we “joined forces” on a project and realized that we worked very well together. Our company is pretty successful, but even with his great experience, sometimes the technology confuses him. He will do things like refer to items on his screen in inches. This is a huge no-no.
I also talk to clients regularly who need to talk to other vendors and are afraid of sounding foolish or not so well versed in the lingo. They will call me up, and because of our friendly relationship, know I will give them the info they need to ask the right questions. So I have compiled a few of those things here for your benefit. I hope you enjoy it or at least find it a little helpful!
- “It looks different on my screen.” or “This isn’t the color I asked for.”
A client might ask for a specific Pantone color (PMS Color) from their Pantone book. The designer sets the file exactly as is required, yet when the client sees an example on their computer monitor they are disappointed that the color isn’t the same.Brightness, contrast, color settings… all monitors have them. Unless two monitors are calibrating to the exact same settings then the colors will always appear different. The best way to color-match is using printed proofs, and even then, your choice of paper can critically affect the color of your printed product.
This is where a little trust and press-checks come into play. You should be able to trust that your designer will set up your PMS colors or 4-color builds to your specifications. Just because the color looks funky on your screen doesn’t mean the color is wrong. It could just mean your color is off on your monitor. Also, metallic inks don’t look metallic on your screen. Your card plastics will look different on screen than they do in real life. A good designer can see the finished product in their head as they are working on a flat file for you. Thats what makes them a good designer.
- “Can you use the image from the website for our brochure?”
Finding the right images can be very time-consuming. Many clients will believe that an image they find online is perfect for their print job. However, in order to look clear, web images must have a resolution of 72 dots per inch (dpi). Print work, on the other hand, requires images to have a resolution of at least 300 dpi.
Anyone responsible for marketing material / printed promotions should be familiar with a design guide for print and understand the technology limitations. Web graphics, in almost every case, are not good for print.
- “Why does it cost so much? My neighbor only charged $200 for a logo.”
The client doesn’t often see the process involved when a graphic designer takes on a logo project. In fact, on most occasions the client will only see a few computer-generated designs. A designer will only use a computer at the end of the logo design process. Beforehand comes clarifying the design brief, research, brainstorming and logo sketching (yes, lots of sketching).
The designer can also think ahead and eliminate bad design selections based on the utilization of the logo. The designer will think about things like promotional items, embroidery, scalability, signage, black and white usage. That $200 logo may look great on paper. But if you don’t have a designer well versed in these things as well as an eye for implementation and font selection - like the folks from MegaFlicks might tell you - you may get what you pay for…
- “Could you make it about half an inch wider? It looks too small on my screen.” or “I can barely read it on my screen, can you make the font bigger?”
You have a few things at play here. You have items designed to go out on the web, and items designed for print.
Anything designed for the web may be proofed on screen. However there is no such thing as an inch or centimeter on a computer screen. Everything is measured by pixels. This is pretty confusing because some screens are set to different resolutions so you could have 5 screens, all 21″ and all 5 of them have a different number of pixels. This sounds like madness right? Yeah, it is. It drives us crazy too.
I have my resolution cranked up because I have pretty decent vision. So 100px (100 pixels) is about an inch on my screen. Dena, who has not-so-great vision, scales her screen at a lower resolutions which means 100px is about 2 inches. So the same graphic on her screen is bigger than mine - but we both have the same size screen. Just the mention of “inches” when dealing with screen graphics makes my skin crawl. It is a pretty difficult concept to explain to people who are not very comfortable with the technology. Don’t feel bad it if you don’t get it. There are still people who are deep into this that still refer to things they see on their screens in “inches”.
You can’t control how different people have their screens set. You have to shoot for the middle. A good designer should be able to look at your website analytics and tell you what your average member’s screen size is. Ours looks like this:
So on an average day, about 28% of our visitors have a screen resolution of 1280×1024, 23% have a screen resolution of 1024×768 and 11% have a screen resolution of 1280×800. So roughly about 71% of our visitors have about the same sized screens. So we will design for those screens. the 2% that have an 800×600 screen will have to work around a little bit. I can’t jeopardize the experience of my 1280×1024 visitors to accommodate the 2% that have 800×600 screens.
Now, for print. Usually we send out proofs in PDF format. Sometimes they are for brochures that may be 17″ wide with a membership application or some other form. The client, unable to proof the document on their screen will print out the brochure and start changing font sizes. The problem is that their perspective is distorted by the printout that they are looking at. I have actually had a client ask me to “up the font size 2 or 3 points on the disclosure” because they couldn’t read it. The problem is that this made the mousetype almost 9pt. For those who don’t know, that is about the size of your regular brochure copy. If we would have followed the clients request, it would have added another 6 inches to their brochure adding to the printing costs and the costs of an unnecessary revisions and layout changes.
Adobe acrobat has an option in the print dialog window to “Scale document to page size”. Do not click this! This will shrink your piece to fit the 8.5″x11″ sheet of paper. This is good to make sure you can see everything but this wrecks your ability to see the piece in its final and correct size. That is why we proof all 8.5″x11″ forms on 11″x17″ sheets of paper. We make sure that it all works out and is compliant. Any designer that you work with should know this and be doing this too.
So these are four, very common, areas that seem to confuse folks when dealing with designers. I hope this makes things a little more clear. If not, let me know and I will take another stab at it. If there is something that is bothering you - like a designer says something that doesn’t quite make sense and you want to run it past the team over here, send us an email. I will respond to it privately and online (with your name omitted).
There is this funny habit with designers where they seem to act like “The Wizard of OZ”. They seem to want you to think there is some kind of magic going on. I am happy to kick back the curtain and let you have a peek at what is going on!
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Comments
Hey thanks Chris! The YES blog is definitely on my short list of sites I hit when you guys have an update.
Keep up the good work!
Great article. Here are a few other pet peeves designers complain about…
1. Can you make the logo bigger?
3. Can you replace the copy I gave you “Join Today”, with this new copy (12 lines of copy that basically say the same thing)?
4. This needs to go out today within the next 15 minutes (after they have had the design for 4 days).
Hey, great post as usual.
BTW, you are now on the mini-blogroll at our blog as well.
Onward!