You’ve heard about keeping deadlines in a business, newspaper, or magazine setting, but turns out, deadlines are equally important for design projects! When a design project starts, establishing a strong communication between the designer and client is key. You have to be clear of project expectations from both sides. This will help set clear and realistic deadlines that can be managed by the designer to work around potential holidays, vacations, or times that deadlines are unable to be met. Good communication is always important when working with a designer and will allow deadlines to be moved, or pushed back if the need arises.
Setting a delivery date or timeline for design projects is critical during the planning stage of a designer’s workload. Some clients are launching ASAP, while others have a more flexible timeline. Setting these deadlines helps a designer establish clear time frames to help accommodate a client’s timeline and order their other work commitments. One way to handle deadlines is to organize a task sheet that you can share with a client. This will organize your design process in the order of which you work. For example, you wouldn’t begin working on the website, until you had a clear direction for the brand. This is a great way to keep an efficient workflow and stick to those deadlines. Keep in mind, as a designer, it is always helpful to be completely transparent with a client on where you are in the design process and when tasks are being completed.
The reason deadlines are so crucial to the designer/client relationship is because of the amount of work designers take on. More often than not, a designer is tackling multiple projects within the same time frame. If tasks have not been efficiently organized and scheduled, it can lead to your designer feeling overwhelmed and under pressure. Ideally, you want your designer to achieve maximum creativity when designing and in order to keep this creativity, the last thing you want is your designer feeling rushed. Keep this in mind, because deadlines go both ways! Client feedback is normally built into a task timeline with deadline dates and will help produce successful design outcomes.
Overall, designers want to deliver exceptional work and clients want their work in a timely manner. By setting up deadlines, both parties are more likely to achieve this outcome and have a great experience while doing so. By sticking to task sheets, you will deliver exceptional design, while keeping the stress at a minimum. Here at The Burnette Agency we handle branding, logo development, marketing, graphic design and more. If you are interested in finding out more information, please don’t hesitate to reach out! We’d love to hear from you! You can reach The Burnette Agency by email at info@theburnetteagency.com or give us a call at 404-850-2081.
