The job of a designer isn’t an easy one for he must assess unfamiliar situations, gain insight, and use his knowledge to come up with design solutions. Additionally, he may have to lead clients through a process foreign to them. Many designers find these challenges a bit too much.

But simply doing as you’re told is a disservice to both you and your clients. It’s up to you to guide them through a sensible, practical, and illuminating process that allows them to better connect with their audiences.

Following are ten takeaways you can put into practice right now.

1- Understand The Client

Some think that design starts with a sketch; but most often that’s far from the truth. Long before you start building, you need to understand who you are working for, what challenges they face, how they are different, and how they need you to help.

You should try starting every new client engagement by getting yourself acquainted to their world. Browse their website and get to know their story; collect all their brochures and see how they present themselves; analyze their mission statement, strategic documents, and past marketing plans to find out what worked and what didn’t. A designer acts like a ghost writer who helps tell someone else’s story which wouldn’t be possible if you’re unable to understand your client inside and out.

2- Understanding the User

The design you produce isn’t really for your client; instead, you are making design that needs to impact your client’s audience. And until you appreciate what their audience needs, wants, and dreams about, the odds of facilitating a connection with this group is negligible. So, ask your client questions about the people they work with, but don’t stop there. Meet the people they interact with and get to know them. Observe their behaviors and find out what they love, hate, and are indifferent toward.

More than this, you need to experience the same things your audience does. Here is an analogy, if you’ll allow me this indulgence: You can tell a virgin all about sex, but he won’t understand what you’re talking about until he’s experienced it for himself. To create great design, you need to think of what your audience experiences first hand. Doing so will not only ground you in this design assignment, but also help you uncover insights that even your client might have missed out on.

3- Thinking According To The Systems

While many think the design process only involves the pursuit of novel, clever, and divergent approaches, design has much more to do with establishing systems. In a website, these systems will involve common workflows, actions, states, navigation behaviors, and visual cues. For a brand, systems might be comprised of consistent elements, spacing, balance, treatments, language, color selections, typographic styles, and so on.

Good design is overwhelmingly linked with order: Clear taxonomy in the organization of content; consistent voice across a multitude of media and materials; intuitive and easily intelligible markers that users understand without needing to think about for even a moment. As a designer, your job is to identify, establish, and institute these sorts of systems in the work you produce; doing so will make your work stronger, and result in guide rails that help your clients successfully implement the design you produce.

4- Never work without a plan

The belief that design is an explorative process does not have much truth to it. Design is rarely ever a directionless free-for-all. Any designer who thinks design to be this freewheeling should reconsider their career choice and think about becoming an artist instead.

Design is a plan as much as anything else. Devising a workable plan involves a lot of articulate thinking, collaboration and refinement. Asking certain key questions, can increase the likelihood of producing work as per your client needs. For example, you must define what your client expects to achieve. This involves establishing goals and objectives, deciding a course of action, and measuring the result to determine whether the design solution is successful. Such tasks might sound overwhelming, but they’re just practical questions that lend you strength just by asking.

5- Present Early; Present Often

The client/designer relationship can be a precarious one. Few clients commission design so regularly that they fully understand what to expect from the design process. Similarly, many designers work so hard to produce good work that they fail to ask how the client feels about the process underway. Therefore, your job as a designer is not only to create effective solutions, but also to ensure your client remains confident in the path ahead.

You can ensure a positive customer experience for your client by communicating regularly and without falling into the trap of over-working a design without client input. Meet regularly with your client to show the work in progress and gather feedback. Explain that what you’re showing them is still incomplete, but that you want to ensure you’re headed in the right direction. They’ll appreciate being included and kept abreast of progress.

6- Be disciplined:

Detail-oriented behavior doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but certain habits can help you be more orderly. Define how you’re going to consistently name files, organize jobs, and store correspondence. Build templates that you can apply from one project to the next, and continually improve. Establish common steps between projects, and run software that helps you document tasks that need to be performed. Through your efforts, you bring order to your clients; there’s no reason for you to not do the same in your own work.

The first step to get over your struggles as a graphic designer, producing suitable design, successfully unveiling creative work, and achieve order and efficiency in your studio’s operations is to acknowledge what part you play in the process; the rest is all about employing sensible approaches and habits.