Top 10 Questions You Need To Ask When Hiring A Logo Designer
There are certain tests and key questions that you need to ask them before hiring. Let's find out!
It is no secret that being a logo designer means consistently dealing with pictures, any visualization elements, software, or any tools for executing the logo design project.
Thanks to the advanced smart designer technologies today, we can find lots of mobile applications with functions that are equal to Adobe Photoshop or CorelDRAW. Even then, logo professionals use different versions and tools (such as laptops, iPads, and more), which lead to their design specializations.
These entire diversities don’t only make the logo designer job one of the most wanted jobs in this century. As an entrepreneur, we should pay attention to the questions we pose to the logo designer candidate.
In the end, our questions will lead us to choose the correct workers for our projects. Once we master these ten questions to ask a logo designer, we can eliminate the unsuitable people and concentrate on our favorite professionals.
1. “May I see your portfolio?”
The portfolio is the heart of every creative professional, and a designer who (will) regularly deal with pictures and visualizations is no exception. These types of questions to ask a logo designer are for us to get to know what types of designers are people in front of us.
For instance, some professionals emphasize rounded or spiral-like shapes with lots of wide strokes in pixels. When we see other logo professionals’ portfolios, we may notice shapes that are different, such as flowers or abstract prints regardless of the project’s themes.
Some of the most evident points concerning the designer portfolio are all about their competencies. The more experienced workers have lots of proportion, color compositions, and other varieties in their portfolios compared to their less experienced counterparts.
So, these workers may not only rely on their designs upon the time-tested Golden Ratio or the Divine Proportion. However, these people see the beauty in other proportions so that the designer can create meaningful logo designs from different proportions and design-related perspectives.
Today, there are many online portfolio websites for logo designers. These designer websites permit design professionals to add comments and titles that are relevant to a particular project. For example, there are the title and description tabs. Sometimes, some tags make the designer more convenient times in looking for accurate portfolio descriptions.
At some points, we can see the testimonies on the projects inside that portfolio website (or source). Later on, we can ask a logo designer those testimony-based questions to gauge their capabilities in handling our projects.
2. “Which are your favorite previous clients (and testimonies), and why?”
These “why” questions to ask a logo designer means probing into the logo designer's mind. Hence, it also becomes a part of knowing the design professionals’ personalities, work ethics, and other important aspects before we hire them.
We can ask things in this question #2 if there are at least five client testimonies in the candidate’s portfolio. We acknowledge the times when we deal with clients who don’t demand much as well as when we deal with difficult clients, and we show our willingness to witness our candidates’ growth as a designer if they join our teams.
Other than watching out for red flags (such as over-glorifying favorite clients), we need to pay attention to the reasoning that the logo designer candidate uses.
A decent designer candidate would insert words and sentences that show focus on their projects and also acknowledgment of our business values, missions, and visions. Even when the designer mentions things they like from the previous projects, they will acknowledge these entire things in their sentences and body language.
3. “What software do you tend to use, why, and how?”
Earlier in this article, we stated that a part of the designer’s job is to use software for designing, creating pictures, and other relevant elements. This question is one of the questions to ask a logo designer to demonstrate his/her capabilities as a designer.
We can match the software they name with the requirements for our project. There will be some discrepancies between the software they use versus the software we need for our visualization project.
However, we can continue with other follow-up questions to ask a logo designer, like, “You mentioned (this function) in the latest software version. Our project uses (this function) in our built-in software. How can you make sure you’re familiar with the functions?” to make sure their project knowledge bases are appropriate for the tasks at hand.
Additionally, these types of questions do not only let the designer disclose the software experiences. We can gauge how deep the experiences are for each designer software they use.
For instance, we don’t only get to know if the person in front of us is familiar with Adobe Photoshop. We will also have a picture of how a person uses certain brushes, renders, and other special effects when they operate the latest version of Adobe Photoshop.
You can even add the questions as you use sample projects to test the person you’re testing. In other words, you can treat the user test parts as the sample project tests to showcase their knowledge and expertise in the software they use the most.
Then, based on what you’ve seen and experienced so far, you can see how the software knowledge and experience demonstrations match with what you need for your projects.
4. “How would you describe your ideal projects?”
Many times, we tend to ask the “what’s” questions to ask a logo designer. As a result, we only receive data that revolves around things like, “Drawing elements that only require basic renderings is practical for me,” Yet, we never know why they think basic rendering is practical.
This question is somewhat similar to the #2 questions that ask about the ideal clients and positive testimonies the designer prefers. However, this #4 tries to probe what the logo designer candidate is thinking about their ideal projects and let them explain why.
Again, this #4 point is not only all about a creative professional’s personality, even though we can make it a personality test in disguise. Instead, we also need to make sure the ways the candidates picture their ideal projects match our design requirements.
In the end, only suitable design professionals can align themselves with our missions, visions, and values, while focusing on the things that they will regularly handle, which involve pictures of any format.
5. “How would you handle copyright issues (or revision rounds)?”
People working in creative industries would ultimately deal with copyrights in many ways. For people who regularly work with pictures and other graphic elements, copyright issues can start from the elements they are working with.
It’s usually not enough for a graphic designer to only seek web pictures that are free from copyright issues without processing the images. Even when the designer has processed the images, other copyright issues such as designs that bear striking resemblances to other designers’ logo designs can arise.
When you ask this question, it means you request information that is crucial for the candidates in conducting their everyday jobs. You need to know if this candidate can defend his/her creations when things are going downhill.
Unlike specific questions about projects, clients, and many others, you don’t need to gauge the candidate’s competency in these types of questions. All you need to assess is their basic knowledge of handling copyright issues, from the pictures involved in their everyday jobs to the end products that can (unintentionally) imitate the competitors’.
Alternative: You can substitute the “copyright issues” part of this question with “revision rounds.” Both of these two things are necessary evils for all creative workers, including a logo designer. So, these things become some other questions to ask a logo designer.
Many times, copyright issues also arise within some revision rounds. For instance, the revised logo can include materials that are (unknowingly) not 100% free from copyrights. Often, such things lead the logo designer to conduct more than two or three major revision rounds.
While revision rounds can sometimes be energy-draining, those rounds become necessary to achieve logo designs that fulfill the company’s criteria to serve the audiences. So, we need to ask the questions to make sure the designers are strong enough to handle revisions (and also further copyright issues concerning the revisions).
6. “How would you describe your most successful channels for your graphic materials?”
Like any other questions in this article, we don’t want to stop at only the “what’s” in things the project candidates are or were doing. As people who want to make sure other people in front of us are suitable additions to our creative teams, we also need to know the “how’s” and “why’s” behind what the candidates are or were doing.
The same thing also applies to this #6 about the marketing channels. We’ve heard over and over that social media marketing channels like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are some of the most successful channels in getting new followers and (eventually) great sums of money for the designer.
Nonetheless, we never know how the process goes until we have the “how” questions like this point in our mind. We expect our candidates to answer things like, “Meeting my favorite design companies was my starting point in reaping the first 1,000 followers in my Instagram account,” when we ask these types of questions.
This question also has an open-ended nature, which means it “forces” the candidates to share what they think. It is also an opportunity for us to see that marketing channels for logo professionals are not limited to social media channels. Many times, candidates mention friends and relatives who recognize their competence in designing various graphic elements.
7. “Why did you choose to apply here?”
This is a general question for every worker to make sure they don’t randomly apply to jobs for the sake of getting more money. After all, we need to ask this question to ensure long-term cooperation between the candidates and us.
People can have different reasons for responding to our job ads. These reasons ultimately tie to their expertise, experiences, and knowledge bases as specialists in what they do. The same thing also applies to any designers, including graphic designers who deal with any type of visualization in their jobs.
However, the question of “Why did you choose to apply here?” doesn’t stop in seeing the reasons behind honing specific skills or operating specific software that the person in front of us knows a lot about.
In asking these types of questions, we should remember that research is the key: The more the person digs deeper into our About Us, history, and so on, the more we have pictures of their seriousness in applying.
As for the design workers, we can see their answers to this question and relate them with answers to other questions to see if the visualization-related expertise they plan to bring to their jobs is compatible with what we need. Ideally, we wish the answer to this question to have relation to the positions a person applies for.
For instance, a decent logo designer candidate will answer with things like, “I see from the About Us page that the X company has worked on these types of projects with these groups of brands. I’ve also worked with similar brands, even though the project nature is different. As for the software, I usually click on this element, and when I saw the job ads, I see you need Y, which matches with my previous experiences of Z,”
8. “Do you consider yourself an independent worker or a team player?”
This #8 is yet another general essential question that can apply to creative workers who deal with pictures, graphics, and more. Most of the creative job ads are for freelancers, which means you will deal with lots of people who prefer to fly on their own.
Nonetheless, we need to at least be able to play in a team when we join a company. So, this question is a challenging one to answer in an absolute manner. Nonetheless, we can push further by reiterating the questions like, “Which one tends to be you when no one’s looking around?”
Here is another question that needs to align with the company’s visions, missions, and values. At the same time, a decent designer can’t tailor the answers just for the sake of aligning with the companies.
So, for example, you can be sure you’ve got the right new team member when you hear answers that they truly like being team players because they love it when other people are happy while collaborating with them. Even though team collaboration is present in your company’s value, the person doesn’t only see it that way because it is part of their nature.
9. “How would you describe your favorite logos?”
You can use this one of the Top 10 questions to ask a logo designer even in the first few rounds of interviews. As people who regularly work with logos and other picture elements, these professionals should at least witness some of the visualizations that they think are cool.
The unfit designer will answer these questions with large differences between their favorite logos and their favorite clients and projects as a whole. No matter how suitable we feel the person in front of us is to our business values, we should reject people with inconsistent answers to these types of questions.
A decent designer candidate will usually insert vivid explanations into their descriptions. For instance, they mention companies that don’t use Golden Ratio but have decent color compositions and line strokes that make those companies distinguishable from their competitors.
However, we can select the person who doesn’t only answer the way decent logo designers answer their favorite logos. As usual, we need to gauge if the answers match our in-company criteria on what visualizations should attract more customers.
10. “How would you envision future design trends?”
This question is particularly important for middle-to-senior-leveled design professionals. After all, employees who are in such levels deal a lot with envisioning future trends.
At the same time, people who apply for lower positions, such as the staff designer and the like, should demonstrate at least basic knowledge of the future logo design trend. If you’re hiring designers with such levels of experience, you need to make sure the person knows what their future supervisors in the design world are directing them.
Since your company has cultures and deeply-held values, this question shouldn’t stop by the people demonstrating their graphic design-related competencies.
Like with any other parts in this article, you need to match their visions with your company’s visions. In addition, you can also ask them follow-up questions on how they would match their visions with your company’s visions and hypothetical situation-related questions to make them demonstrate their knowledge.
Final words
The crucial thing you need to pay attention to in your questions for the logo designer candidate would be whether they match your visions, missions, and the like. Even though competency in handling crucial drawing picture skills is also important, you need to make sure they are not just competent in handling different sets of software.
Some of the ten questions include follow-up questions. At some points, you can also use these follow-ups to gauge how well the logo designer in front of you matches your criteria and competence in handling the projects.
