Graphics Design – 12 Effective Steps you should know for you to excel ?

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As a graphics designer, there are some effective graphics design steps that you should follow so that you can do well in the industry.

May be you have seen yourself as someone that is good & perfect in drawing and designing and your drawing skill is near to a well-known painter by name Pablo Picasso, you will know that graphic design may be a business idea for you.

Today there are many software’s available online that can help a graphics designer to pursue his/her goal.

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Software’s like Adobe Photoshop, Corel Draw and many others can be used to summon up posters, logos, pictures, letterheads, brochures, product packaging design and many others designs as related to graphics.

As a graphics designer, you can design graphics for companies, clients in freelance works, individuals, public including advertising agencies and modelling industries.


What you need to know

Having a certificate on graphics design is just an addition to what you already know in graphics design. But if you have a recommendation on previous places you have worked as a graphics designer, its a plus.

May be in a publishing industry or arts design company, is the best thing you need to know as the experience you have when presenting yourself as a graphics designer.

As a graphics designer, you need to be versatile & effective in capturing designs to help your clients get exactly what they have in mind before consulting you.

As this will help your clients to know how to market the idea that you’ve conjured together. Whatsoever thing they pictured in mind, they will have it designed as they want.

You’ll be surprised that from recent research made, Pay scale shows that half of graphics designers today have less than four years of experience in the field. While just small percent of graphics designers have gotten up to twenty years of experience in the field.


As a graphics designer, having so many years of experience is not that kind important. The main thing is for you to have a good designing ability to deliver any kind of graphics work.

Some people have less than two years of experience but they can deliver projects that designers with fifteen years of experience delivers.

If you’re interested in graphics design and you have few months/years of experience, you can do well in the industry. Most specially if you have good knowledge of very important tools like Corel Draw, Adobe Suite, Photoshop and many others.

Step 1: Observe your Incentive Degree in graphics design

The reason for doing something and how committed you’re determines how successful you’ll be in doing any business. As a graphics designer you need to have a tangible reason why you are interested in graphics and you’ll know how committed you’re.

knowing your incentive degree is one of the effective graphics design steps you need to know before diving into the industry.

So many graphics designer contend in making their business successive because they are not much committed to the business and their vigor coupled with their determination is not equivalent to the goal they are pursuing.

If you’re motivated to begin graphics design as a carrier only that you have some clients that have committed some projects to you, it’s time for you to know what is inside the business you’re jumping into.

Just because you have some projects from clients should not be the major incentive for starting up graphics design as a business. Remember that beginning a new business is not always easy as you may think.

Without good incentive you may be tempted to shut down the business because in starting up a new business, it’s a must that will encounter so many challenges in the process.

Things to have in mind

When starting up a new business, there will be a time when some of your clients will start moving to your competitors for them to do the same work you suppose to do for them.

As a beginner you may find it difficult to discover jobs. At this moment you won’t be making cool cash as you’d expected when starting up the business.

If you have a strong incentive, this is the moment when your incentive will drive you to succeed in that business. If you don’t have good incentive for the business, during this period you’ll lack confidence in the business and challenges will overwhelm you.

Nevertheless, if you have a strong incentive and passion for graphics, this will be your driving force for starting graphics design as a business. And it will actually make your dream to come true.

If you start this business and you have not started earning from it, it’s your incentive passion and commitment will be driving you to continue in the business because you’re motivated enough before starting the business.

Step 2:  Believe and know your talent/capacity in graphics design

In our world today, graphics design has become a lucrative business. There are so many companies, places and categories where graphics are applied. In starting up graphics design as a business, you have to know your capacity of what you can be able to do i.e. your ability.

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As a newbie in starting up graphics design as a business, you need to undergo a deep research to know the perfect choice of your clients when it comes to requesting different designs.

Reason is because you may not know all the designs that clients usually demand for their businesses or companies.

Below are some prerequisite categories that clients usually demand from designers

  • Web designing
  • Logo designing
  • Animation
  • Poster designing
  • Brochure designing
  • Info graphics

Enlarge your talent and your capacity by studying the market trends to know what clients demand in the graphics market today. This will improve your chances of succeeding in your business as per setting up graphics design business.

From latest research, graphics design has so much value when it comes to money currency. With categories like logo design taking up huge value of dollars in the world market today.

Graphics design has gotten to the point that almost everything done today comprise some graphics in order to increment the market value.

Remember that your incentive degree will be your dragging force when it comes to setting up and maintaining the business.

Step 3: Create your Talent in Diverse Areas in graphics design

Today so many companies have much demand on info graphics because they want their business description to be self-explained.

If you’re a graphics designer and you major in areas like animation, brochures and poster designing, it’s time for you to study what trends in the graphics market today.

knowing your talent is very crucial in establishing this effective graphics design steps.

Of recent the demand for info graphics in the market today is enlarging and designers that major on info graphics seems to have so many clients than others in the same field, because many companies are going for info graphics than they ever did in order to create awareness for their products.

The main reason for you to create your talent in diverse areas is for you to be able to meet all the demands that may ever come from your clients at any time. But in all of them try your best to have some areas that you specialize. It can be logo designing or animation.

As a result of these, there is a need for you to create your talent & capacity in diverse areas as relating to graphic design.

Step 4:  Create your Goal and Mission in graphics design

Setting your goal will influence your gratitude towards your design models for client choice of taste. Before setting your goal and mission, you must have knowledge of so many designs in the graphic industry. You can’t just jump into graphics design because you know your goal.

Your mission as you can see in about us page, is the leading effective graphics design steps for every business across the globe.

Initially you need to know the mission and goal of the company you’re about to set up. As soon as you’ve discovered your company’s goal, you will be more comfortable to create your business plan.

Once you’ve drawn your business plan, the next thing is to begin to ponder on how you’re going to succeed with the already drawn business plan.

Consider if your business plan can help you to fetch some clients within some period of time. With this you will know how many clients you need to reach out in order to make your business a success.

Initially your marketing plan will be controlled by some actions gotten from observed facts. It’s necessary for you to create different plan alternatives, if alternative A didn’t work, you can switch to alternative B or C this is if alternative A didn’t yield much fruit, you will check if other alternatives will meet your anticipated outcome.

Having much distance and small distance ambition is very crucial in determining your advancement and growth in the business.

It’s very important to always check your business advancement more often as well as the capacity or measure of where your business is now and where you want it to be in the future.

Step 5: Establish Potential Customers in graphics design

Setting the limit of your goal or market objective is one of the most crucial steps in beginning graphics design as a business. Out there, we have assorted categories you will have to consider before starting the business.

Below are few questions you have to ask yourself;

  1. Do you plan to present your business service to big and average corporate companies or small local establishment?
  2. The class of people who are planning to purchase your service will they be youthful men and women that are trying to set up their enterprise may be in brochure design?

You need to first of all know what your potential clients will need. Once you have known this, you will now know if your present talent can satisfy their needs.

Satisfying the ultimate needs of your potential customers will push your effective graphics design steps to reality.

When all these are known to you, you can go ahead to develop your marketing strategy and enterprise style that will best fit your market goal.

Graphics design
Prove your design skills. Source netleafinfosoft

Step 6: Organize a Competitive Analysis

As a graphic designer, it is certain that you must know some things before starting up graphics design as a business.

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You’re not planning to be a road side graphics designer and you need to have in mind that there are so many competitors in the business you are planning to venture into.

Knowing how to beat your competitors is a plus in learning effective graphics design steps

Before moving on to begin your graphic design business, you need to study the graphics market attentively. Try to have an insight on how other enterprise in the same business are successfully running their business.

Give more interest to the things that made such enterprise to be successful and to have great difference among other competitors in the same business. Having this kind of knowledge will give you more hint on how to make your business successful.

Having knowledge of your competitors will give you some merits like:

  1. How you can improve on your skills in other to beat your competitors
  2. To learn from errors they’ve made in the past & not to make such mistakes
  3. Additional things to do in other to have more potential clients
  4. To learn from their financial profitability stories


Have deep insight on the things that your competitors is doing and try to present something unusual (awesome). Doing this and maintaining this will give you more knowledge for you to be ahead of the competition.

It’s a normal thing to adapt good ideas from different successful competitors in the industry. Nevertheless, you need to create new ideas in order to stand out from your competitors. Doing this will help you to be successful as a newbie in the business.

Step 7: Labor on Price Level

Having known to you that you’re about to begin your business on graphics design, you need to do a market survey on the price level of different products in graphics design.

Make sure to collect detailed data on the cost of various services in the industry. When you’re done with this, you can now organize and plan the excellent price level that is going to work for you.

You can decide to reduce your price level a bit initially. Knowing how to set an average price helps your effective graphics design steps to rise.

When you have consistent potential clients, you can fix your price level at the same rate with other competitors out there. Doing this will grow your business to wider audience and also build your business name among other competitors.

In starting the business, you will have need to reduce your price level but not that too low in order to attract clients.

The law of demand says that;

“The lower the price, the higher the quantity demanded and the higher the price, the lower the quantity demanded.”

So you can apply this law in order to gather potential clients to your new business.

In lowering your price, you’ll make sure to increase your product standard. Remember that you’re doing this for a reason and that reason is to attract clients to your new business.

You should also have in mind that some clients want to pay huge amount of money for a premium service that they want.

Therefore in setting your price level, try to categorize your products into high priced & low priced products. This is ensure that you didn’t lose any client that will be in need of your services.

Step 8: Focus on Legal Appearance

Legal appearance involves the public registered license of the business you’re about to start. You know that you want to start up your business in a big way not as a road side graphics designer.

So you need to discuss with a lawyer about registering your business to the government. Your lawyer will assist you in setting up your business registration and other insurance policies.

Think on how to get approved license, legal insurance in the business you’re planning to start up. You’ll need to converse or discuss with your lawyer about some problems like trademark and copyright issues that may pop up while registering your business.

The size of the business you’re about to set up will determine how you’re going to set your privacy and refund policies, the way you’re going to be settling disputes and other legal problems that may rise up in the future.

It is mandatory that you should have a lawyer and the lawyer should be able to sort you out in such situation.

This aspect as regards setting up your new business sounds silly to most people and they will neglect it at the initial, but will encounter a problem that relates to that in the long run.

The way you’ve learnt this effective graphics design steps will determine how your business structure will look like.

Step 9: Search for Correct Expert to grow your Business

In setting up your new business, there are certain areas that you don’t have much knowledge. Here you need to hire some clients in order to meet your target goal.

Since you already have in mind that you’re going to be hiring clients to assist you in some aspects concerning your business, you may be considering average of 5 clients (since you know that it’s just for a temporary moment and not permanent staffs).

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Having known this! You need to use those clients you hired and organize a strong team that can be able to give your new business an outstanding name in the market.

Like I said before – starting with an average of 5 hired clients, by default you should know that when your business is growing you should hire more clients in order to meet the demands of your potential clients.

If your business is all about cloth printing and t-shirt designing, you should be able to research and find out the latest design that is trending in the market.

Since you have mapped out some cash to hire some clients that will be working with you, you should target some expert clients in your business area (cloth printing and t-shirt design), as these will make boost your sales in the market.

There is need for you to spend money in coaching and training your new clients as this will improve your business as it grows from level to level.

Hiring freelancers can as well boost your effective graphics design steps.

Some people may ask
Why must I hire clients for my new business?

The simple answer is – two good heads are better than one. This is all about partnership in businesses.

Step 10: Seek for a Suitable Workspace

Almost everything is money. But while setting up your workspace, try to get a conducive workspace. But if can’t get such, you can start your business; for example cloth printing in your home. Since materials and equipment needed for cloth printing can be handled indoor.

 If you don’t have enough cash to set your business in a big way, you can follow the above method but make sure that your workspace is big enough to contain every works and projects that need to be carried on in the mapped area.

While working in your home if you chose to be working from home in the initial, try to avoid all distractions that may pop up in the home surroundings.

Have in mind that your home is your temporary site and always strive to move to a comfortable office which will give your clients (temporary staffs) comfortable space while working for you and with you.

Conducive environment is one of the factors to consider when learning effective graphics design steps.

Step 11: Go for the correct Tools

In order to achieve your target goals while setting up your new business, you need to have professional software’s and high configuration computer system.

Most of the professional software’s in the market for making great and awesome designs are not free. So you need to include the purchasing fee as your expenses while setting up your business. Some has monthly subscription fees, yearly and some one time purchasing fee.

It’s necessary to undergo series of research in order to find out the best professional tools that can be used to satisfy the need of your potential clients that will patronize your business.

There is a need for you to do this since you know that as your business grows, you will still recover whatsoever you spent while setting your business up.

Step 12: Plan your Marketing Strategy

You should have in mind that marketing is the soul of almost every business. Even if you provide the best service in the world and you are unable to let people know about your business, you’ll be equivalent to the unknown businesses out there.

Do much you can to organize a standard marketing strategy that will boost your business to the next level and you need to regularly maintain it.

Your marketing strategy can be online marketing and you can as well use real-life marketing using bill boards on the road side.

In this 21 century, most businesses are being advertised online and they still meet up with the expected targeted audience. So you can maximize the use of social media platforms to advertise your business to wider audience.

You should have in mind that if you don’t advertise your business, people will not be able to reach your business. Even your close friends won’t know about your business if you don’t tell them. So try your best not to skip this step while setting up your business.

Conclusion

Devising business ideas and executing it is the major key for every successful business. And you should know that consistency is one of the keys in succeeding in your business (consistency yields much result).

Creating a website for your business is also advisable as this will enable your potential clients to get in touch with you from the comfort of their homes and also review the products you offer and how standard they are.

Make sure to be positive and consistence when setting up and when running your business.

The knowledge you have about your competitors and the market your about to move in, will be a plus as regards your success in the industry.

If you’re able to practice all this steps, with time you will see your business growing to what you expected before starting the business. Help spread this article to your friends. Thanks.



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