Design Service FAQ
Answers to popular questions I’ve been asked throughout my career.
The famous Pablo Picasso was at a party. A woman recognized him and approached the Master. She asked, “Will you create a sketch for me?” Picasso agreed, and, as he pulled out his sketchpad, asked her for a subject. “A bird in a tree will do,” she responded. So Picasso spent about a five minutes doing what Picasso does on the sketchpad. Finished, he ripped the sketch off the pad, handed it to the woman and said, “That will be $10,000.” The woman was floored. “Ten thousand dollars! Why, it only took you five minutes to draw that sketch!” To which, Picasso replied, “No, madam. That sketch took me a lifetime.”
I by no means claim to be anywhere near Picasso’s hemisphere, but I love this story because it captures the premise of why I don’t charge hourly. My fees are always value-based and value has nothing to do with how much time it takes.
Early stage startups and venture capital teams are often involved in cool innovative projects which invigorates me as a designer. These teams are also typically small, well funded, and nimble which is a perfect fit for a freelancer. Most importantly, these types of clients are most often places where I can inject massive value add. If you already have a huge marketing team and design people on staff, I’d prefer you lean on their expertise.
When you hire a guy like me.. I swing for the fences creatively. This means when I submit a design, its typically either going to be a home run, or a strikeout. I dive deep into your story and put my absolute best foot forward to breath life into your vision.
But when you’re swinging for the fences, strikeouts do happen from time to time. If you don’t like my initial design, I will ask a lot of questions and will want you to be specific so we can move through revision cycles efficiently and effectively.
At the end of the day, I’m at bat for you. I want you as thrilled about the work as I am.
Important Notes:
I work best with well-funded professionals who are ready to invest in top-quality design work across branding, apps, web, and presentation decks. 80% of my clients are funded seed/series A startups, or venture capital/private equity groups. I also work best with people who get the value of good design and are willing to respect my domain expertise.
We aren’t a good fit if:
- You are on a shoe-string budget
- You’re a micro-manager
- You don’t have a well-defined story or vision
Everything I do is fixed fee value-based pricing. I do not charge hourly. Fees for a fortune 500 company will be significantly higher than a pre-seed startup. I charge 50% up front, 50% on project completion.
To get moving on any deck design project, I prefer 3 things up front (aside from a deposit):
- Established brand guide (logo, colour scheme, typography)
- Detailed content outline in rough form (bullet points on blank slides)
- I’ll want you to pitch me or present to me via zoom meeting*
*Hearing you present with your content as it stands really helps me pick up on subtleties that don’t come through in a static outline.
I design everything initially in Apple Keynote. It’s by far the best presentation tool ever built. But I can deliver in Keynote (.key), Powerpoint (.pptx), and Google Slides. For interactive course module design, I work in Adobe Captivate.
Depending on capacity, I can typically turn around a max 20-slide deck in 24 hours, for a premium.
I am best suited for completely new brand projects, or brand re-fresh work. In either case, I’ll want to get to know your story, your vision, and see brands that inspire you.
This is a widely covered topic and there’s already a ton of writing on the importance of having a strong brand, but essentially, and especially in today’s increasingly crowded attention economy – a brand is the thing that allows people to associate with you almost instantaneously and even subconsciously. Its all about differentiating yourself from your competitors and becoming known for something (your reputation).. ideally something that people prefer over your competition.
Importantly, the way you distinguish yourself digitally, is by looking and sounding unique (brand voice) across all the places your customers will see you and interact with you (touchpoints). Continuity in this experience signals to your customers that you have a large, stable, and well thought-out platform.
Achieving this continuity is the job of the brand guide (or book).
Brand Guide:
A brand guide is the minimal set of components to establish an adequate visual language that can drive design consistency across all future design projects for your company. The brand guide is comprised of the logo (and all variations), colour palette, and typography.
Brand Book:
The brand book is a comprehensive exploration of your brand’s story. Its much more than just the basic brand elements. It will also contain mission statements, vision statements, brand adjectives, and visionary mockups across channels (ie. web, social, print, packaging). The brand book is the culmination of the visual and written expression of your brand in all the places it will show up, publicly and internally. It can be relied upon to drive not just guidance, but also inspiration for future creative works.
To get moving on any UX design project, I prefer 3 things up front (aside from a deposit):
- Established brand guide (logo, colour scheme, typography)
- Design wireframes, or at minimum, a feature document describing how things are supposed to work on each view
- I’ll want to see 3-5 inspiration examples of UX you love, so I know what you’re after.
A UX view is any single screen in a web app or mobile app that allows a user to “do stuff” – think if it like a single web page in a website. This could be logging in, editing a profile, browsing a marketplace, viewing a digital wallet.. etc.
So there are two types of UX design deliverables I can work on:
- UX Prototypes
- Coded UX Views*
The first is what I call UX Prototypes. These are fully designed, high fidelity Sketch files that can be handed to a front-end developer to be turned into engineering-ready coded UX app views. The second is the actual coded UX views (HTML/CSS/JS) that an engineer can use to develop the full stack.
*At the moment I only work with the bootstrap CSS framework for coded app views but I am learning react and will soon have that on offer.
UX design is a broad field and it can be a full-time career for many. I don’t pretend to compete with a full-time UX designer on a large product team. I am however well suited for an engineering founding team that has never invested in UX design and would like to get an MVP shipped to early adopters.
I am also great for helping pre-seed startups articulate their app vision with high-fidelity prototypes mocked up onto iPhones etc. This is really great value add to seed level pitch decks. Angel investors like to see that you have a well-defined vision and path to get there.
Popular websites around website work
To get moving on any web design project, I prefer 3 things up front (aside from a deposit):
- Established brand guide (logo, colour scheme, typography)
- Detailed website outline in rough form (bullet points on MS word)
- I’ll want to see websites that inspire you so I know what you’re after
I am not a web developer so WordPress allows me to build amazing websites in a relatively short period of time. WordPress also powers 35% of all websites on the internet so when it comes to troubleshooting, there is almost never a time where the problem at hand hasn’t been experienced by thousands before us. So its easy to upkeep.
Finally, WordPress is easy to manage and teach to people that are not web developers/designers. I have trained tons of teams over my career on the basics of WordPress and they are able to make lots of changes on their own, saving time and money.
I do not. I will recommend a few top-notch WordPress hosting services to use and then I’ll use your admin login to setup the site and make sure everything works at launch.
I do not. I would recommend looking into Upwork.com to find cheaper freelancers who can provide ongoing site maintenance. If however you’d like new pages added to the website I previously built, I’d be happy to take a look and work out a fixed fee.
I do not. I would recommend looking into Upwork.com to find SEO specialists who can provide ongoing optimization help.