How to Sell Design

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 o

A well-designed world is a better world. I love knowing that a thoughtful piece of user interface makes someone’s life go a bit easier, whether it’s designing a menu that’s accessible to someone with low vision or watching my seventy-one-year-old father intuitively use an iPad for the first time. Good design has the power to change lives in big and

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 d

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

Most studios, us included, insist on a deposit based on a percentage of the project before we start work. Depending on the project’s size, it could range from 25% to 50% of the total project cost. Design studios aren’t a high-margin business. Getting that money up front gives us the running room to get the project going and dedicate people to your

Let’s say you want an image-heavy site, but you don’t have a photographer or an image editor to maintain it. That’s a major constraint. So we ask if you’re willing to hire one. If you aren’t, we say we can’t design an image-heavy site. If you insist on seeing one anyway, we say no again, because we can’t propose a design solution you can’t sustain.

So when you discuss pricing with your designer (and it should be a discussion), make sure they can stand behind their quote. Have them walk you through it and explain why they’re charging what they’re charging. You should get an itemized breakdown for the project’s major parts. Some designers and studios may even be willing to give you an hourly li

We hire professionals because we can hold them accountable. If you get audited, you better believe you’re taking your accountant with you to the hearing. If the credit card processing system on your site goes down, you want to know that your engineering team is on it. You also want to be able to call them into your office and ask what happened. Whe

The company that sent you a bid for $100K may have bid $80K if you’d shown up a month earlier. And the company that bid $250K may have bid $175K for a similarly complex job if you were a nonprofit rather than a luxury resort company. Estimates aren’t really a matter of whether you want to pay $50K or $100K, but whether you’re willing to pay that pa