Collecting Information

This is the first phase of the project – research and communication with the client. The key of this step is to find out as much as possible about the task at hand and get a good sense of what the client wants, what they need, and eventually what they will get. Some clients say almost everything you need to know in the brief, some clients never deliver the brief at all (no need to tell you how that usually goes), but a short conversation or a couple emails thrown back and forth is always a good way to kick things off. During this stage, you’ll probably be in touch with the client the most.

The Numbers

Once you got all the information you need – it’s time to start putting the numbers together. Clients will usually submit an RFP in order for you to send them an estimate – a proposal on their project. Steady clients usually just send an email saying what they need and when they need it. It’s much more informal and to tell you the truth – much simpler.

Superawesome sends proposals in forms of an SOW type of document. It’s a short document (just a couple of pages) that defines:

• The deliverables – both ours and the clients, it describes what we will do for them and what we will need from them in order for us to do our job.
• The deadlines and milestones – timeline of the project, when the phases start, when they are due, etc.
• The project scope (if needed) – I wrote “if needed” because if the client is requiring a fixed per-project pricing we require them to deliver the brief, if the billing is hourly we are putting together the brief and sort of then collaboratively come to a final version.
• The payment methods – whether we are doing fixed pricing or hourly.
• The task breakdown – what exactly we’ll do in order to complete the project.

This entire process will yield an estimate, our proposal of the total amount of resources (time, money, manpower) needed for getting the job done.

Getting Down To Work

Everything usually starts in Photoshop. We do comps and send them to clients for approval. They send back their comments and we make the required changes and submit those back. This iterative process has made it so that we are able to respond to client’s wishes very effectively, and is in fact saving us both time, because of the scope changes and being able to add or subtract elements from the design has proven to be very necessary. By taking small steps and smaller iterations we are able to do just that.

Getting Signoff

This is a really important moment. You should always get signoff on things that are considered done. Weather it’s a page design mockup, a logo, xHTML/CSS or a PHP script, if the client says they are satisfied, ask them to sign a piece of paper that will confirm that.

Implementation and Launch

After we’re done with the design phase in Photoshop we move to the xHTML/CSS of those mockups. In this phase we usually ask for no input from the client. xHTML/CSS is a pretty straight-forward thing, clients usually put a lot of trust in our capabilities here, so there is no need really to go into explaining the semantics or validity of the said documents and whatnot.

We do our thing, and (if needed) when we implement it into a CMS we just ask them to run through it, see if they are satisfied and if they are, they are handed a manual on how to use the CMS and populate their site with content and later manage it by themselves. Usually they do that while the site is still on our development server, once they are done we move the site to their own server, we check if everything is working as it should and that’s it, job done.

The Conclusion

I hope by giving you this insight in our basic operation you are more aware of what’s actually involved in working with a design firm. Keep in mind I wrote “with”, not “for” – you see that you as a client are very much a part of that process, and you should keep that in mind when you are on that side of the deal.

If you have any questions regarding working with us, please don’t hesitate to ask, I’d be glad to answer all of your questions.