My Design Workflow Part 1
Hello Hello! And welcome to February!
Finally made it through the first month of the year, shaken ourselves off from the holiday and new year relaxation and are back in full swing, at least I hope so haha. Today I wanted to talk about my workflow as a freelance designer.
When it comes to clients, I have a pretty standard process from initial contact to starting the project.
Questionnaire + Welcome Guide
Proposal
Contract
Conceptual Design Presentation
Questionnaire + Welcome Guide
When approached by a client, I like to get to know more about them, their communication style, their project wants, needs, and budget to help decide if I’d be a right fit for them. This is where the questionnaire comes in as it helps manage my expectations as well as the clients form the beginning. I also send over a welcome guide which details how a project flows, costs, billing, as well as what they can expect in terms of deliverables. It’s really helpful in painting the picture of expectation early on, as well as looks super professional. I did not create this guide so I’m not sure if I can share it publicly, but I plan to use it as a template for my own design in the future. Stay tuned for that.
Proposal
Once we have both decided to move forward, we move to the next step which is the proposal. For this it was definitely a labor of love for me. Working as a Designer & Project Manager for other people, you don’t get an opportunity to see what this phase looks like. A lot of designers like to keep their methods “proprietary”. I however, don’t subscribe to that ideology. I’ll make a post specifically to talk about the details of a proposal from my perspective, but the main ingredients are project site information, scope of work, and mood boards to show general design direction (nothing too specific as that comes later in the last step.)
Contract
Now, this part is not legal advice by any means. This is just how I do things currently. For my contract I had a standard interior design/ contractor contract in my documents from a while ago. I used that as the base for my contract, and added to it based on previous experience and tips from other designers on Youtube. Including things like your design fees, payments and fees, which should’ve been introduced in the welcome guide, as well as detailing your collaboration with contractors and consultants and limitations of liability. These are a few clauses I currently have in mine.
Conceptual Design Presentation
This is where the real fun begins. You’ve come to an agreement, contract has been signed, and now it’s time to design. Depending on the scope of the project, I approach this step in different ways.
For a project where I am adding to an existing space, using their furniture and some of their accessories, I begin designing from the very beginning. However, if we are starting with a completely blank canvas, then I have an extra step to consider. To have a cohesive space, I like to send furniture options of different designs styles to see where their tastes fall. Some want a more Art Deco style, while others are more into Mid Century Modern or even stark Minimalism. This step in vital in finding out the clients opinion on different styles, features, trends, etc so you can make more information based decisions for their space.
The elements of the conceptual design presentation include: overall floorplan & elevations (or by room if needed), and renderings. Renderings can be 2D or 3D depending on your resources. I generally do 2D elevation renderings to show the pieces together in scale like shown here. It helps those who are a bit “dimensionally impaired” as I like to say.
All of these elements make up the first half of my workflow. This is an overview of the major elements to get a project going. Come back next time where we’ll discuss some of the finer detail items such as 2D renderings in detail, tearsheets for approval, and project spreadsheets to keep things organized. I hope this was helpful. Please leave a comment below and let me know what your workflow consists of, or how would you do things differently. I love talking shop!
Till Next Time
XOXO
MH