Once you’ve hired a designer you need to trust them to do their job. This is harder than it sounds.

Successful design projects need equal participation from the client and the designer. Yet the design process remains a mystery to the people who buy it. Design isn’t sausage. You’ll enjoy it even more if you understand how it’s made.

Look, you can get a website for $500. You can also get a website for $70 million. The former is gonna have less stuff on it than the latter. (Neither will necessarily trump the other. I’ve seen kickass $500 websites. I’ve also seen million-dollar budgets go down in flames.) Knowing how much money you’ve committed to a project helps a designer

Imagine two chair shops across the street from each other. One shop takes the chair’s design into consideration from the start. They hire the best chair designer they can. The chair designer researches other chairs on the market to figure out where they’re lacking. They ask people what they like and dislike about their current chairs, research

If you and I were to design a chair together, we’d have to consider some factors from the get-go. Of course, we’d consider the seat’s size, the height from the ground, the angle of the back, the materials, and the fabric. Before we made any of those decisions, we’d ask ourselves about the chair’s goals. Who would be using the chair? What would they

If the project is big enough, you may have a couple of payments due at agreed-upon milestones, with a final payment on completion. I advise designers to define completion as something within their control. For example, if your designers are delivering front-end code for your internal team to implement, completion should be defined as the delivery

Design isn’t magic and it isn’t art. It’s a craft. Design solves a problem within a set of given constraints. We’ll talk about why those constraints matter. Much as a doctor needs patients to practice their craft, a designer needs clients to practice theirs. Like walking into a doctor’s office, describing what’s wrong, and then having your doctor

To get design’s full value, you need to hire a professional. You need a designer. Would you trust any other valuable part of your business to someone who wasn’t qualified to do it? Would you let your cousin’s best friend do your accounting because they had a calculator? Or let your neighbor reprogram your fuel injection system because they have

If a designer shows you work in progress, it’s a great sign. It means they’ve moved beyond a fear that all you’ll see is the broken stuff to a willingness to collaborate with you. Look at it in the spirit of collaboration. Ask questions about what they’re showing. Talk about where they’re headed with it. Feel free to ask if there’s any feedback