What to Say to a Graphic Designer

When you’re a graphic designer, one of the hardest things to do is trying to interpret  your client’s vague, obscure and sometimes ridiculous requests that do not clearly state what they want. 

Italian designer Luca Masini has created a set of images called “Things You Shouldn’t Say To A Graphic Designer” for the purposes of education I’ve renamed this “What to Say to a Graphic Designer” with the most common “ridiculous” requests from clients.

I’ve decided to detail them here and also offer a phrase we’d like to hear instead – What to Say to a Graphic Designer

“Use a picture from my facebook”

I personally HATE this one… Ok so lets start from the beginning. Screen resolution is much lower than print resolution. So your 180px x 180px Facebook profile picture might look great on the screen, but when taking that to high quality print its gonna either be the size of a full stop or look like a pixelated, cubist, impressionist mess.

What would be a more acceptable question would be: “I have some images on my facebook, could you use them as examples?”

What to Say to a Graphic Designer

 

“I’ll send it in a word document, is that ok?”

Oh God, please, no. This is the utmost worst thing a designer can hear…

Microsoft Word maybe the worlds most popular word processing software and for good reason, but its the absolute worst image editing software ever created, that’s because it was never intended to be. Word is only good for one thing: Unadulterated, unformulated, unformatted text.

A better question to ask would be: “Which is the best format to send my logo in?”

 

What to Say to a Graphic Designer