When does the Graphic Design end?

Graphic Design is alive and well on this island! Living on Long Island is expensive! If you are reading this, I am sure you’ll agree. So to be able to live and thrive on this island there are lots of small businesses. Most of the work we do here is for small businesses. Local companies trying to make a big splash on a small budget. It makes perfect sense, and it is what we have to do!

Most small businesses who contact us are in need of a lot of services. More often than not, an initial consultation is generally us finding out what a client doesn’t need. What I mean by this, is when we ask what can we help you with, the response is typically “everything”! The world of online marketing has created a visibility race, which includes necessities such as website design, graphic design, print marketing, social media monitoring and a slew more! We really enjoy branding businesses, helping them to get what they see in their heads, on their computer monitors. And all visual content requires graphic design. Whether its a website, flyer,business card, whatever. All these services are categorized in our eyes as graphic design. We are designing a visual representation of a companies name and values.

We are currently working with a client who contacted us for everything! They needed a new website, a logo, business cards, a commercial for both web and network tv, a radio commercial and they will also be sprinkling in some pay-per-click advertising. Phew! That’s a lot. However, we’ve been working on the logo for 3 weeks. is this typical? No. The client has lots of ideas and values he is trying to convey with his logo. Initially it started as “I want it to look good”. So we submitted several logo variations.  The response from these were, “these look great! Can you make these look more official”. So we changed the logos theme to more of a badge type. These received great response as well. But the colors weren’t working for the client now. OK, we went in for a third round of logo design. And now they have chosen one.

With ten or more services in queue, spending three weeks on a logo is a long time. But is it too long? Obviously, we could have use a standardized form to narrow down what the client was looking for. And sometimes we do. But with this client, they didn’t know necessarily what they wanted. And thats ok! We spent additional time on creating their logo, probably 15 hours in total. That may seem like a lot of time invested. But this client will be spending 50-60 hours weekly representing this logo. Becoming the face and work behind this logo. We may have spent more time allotted on this logo design than we anticipated, but we are fine with that. It will be a drop in the bucket compared to what our client will spend developing its reputation.

And once the logo and color scheme is final. Then we begin graphic design of the website. The business cards. The invoices. The commercial. The web advertising and banners. The list goes on and on. And when does the “Graphic Design” aspect of our services end? It doesn’t. If its something perceived visually, no matter what the medium. It is all graphic design! It is all a visual representation of a brand, a company.

Graphic Design isnt just a logo or business card. It is all things perceived by your clients eyeballs! So you tell us, when does Graphic Design end?