Five Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Brand Designer
When thinking about hiring a brand designer, the advice tends to focus on evaluating the designer, including their portfolio, process, and pricing among other things. Those things are important to evaluate, but there’s another factor that isn’t discussed as often.
Before assessing whether a designer is the right fit, a health practice or nonprofit needs to assess whether the organization itself is ready for the project. If a brand is built on unclear organizational foundations, it can end up backfiring or counting against the business regardless of the designer's skill.
Below are five questions to answer before starting the conversation with a designer.
The starting point: What problem are we trying to solve?
The question doesn’t start with "what do we want our brand to look like?", but “what problem is the current brand failing to solve?” Follow-up questions can include: Is the business attracting the wrong patients or donors? Does it lack clear communication about what the organization does? Does it need to look inconsistent across different materials?
The answer to this question determines the scope of the project, the success criteria, and whether design is actually the solution or whether the problem lies elsewhere. Organizations that can't answer this question clearly often end up with a beautiful new brand that still doesn't solve the underlying issue.
Another way to look at it: we can think of this similarly to how a house is built — it’s important to establish the foundation before figuring out what color to paint the walls.
1. Can you articulate who you serve specifically?
A brand is built around its audience, so if the audience is vaguely defined by "people who need wellness support," "underserved communities," or "patients seeking quality care" then the brand built for that audience will also be vague.
Before a designer creates a message that communicates to the right audience, the audience needs to be understood from every angle. In the Discovery & Direction phase, we do this by defining the audience, including understanding what problems they are dealing with, what needs they have when they encounter the organization, and what would make them stay or leave.
2. Do you have a decision-making structure for the project?
This question may sound purely administrative, but it's important to answer early on. When designing a brand that requires full board approval or sign-off from multiple stakeholders, the result is typically an average of everyone's preferences.
A better solution includes working with one person (a primary decision-maker) on the project and has the authority to approve without needing additional consensus.
3. What's the timeline and what's driving it?
A hard deadline that revolves around a campaign launch, grant cycle, or major event changes how a project should be scoped. For example, our four-week brand strategy and identity project, The Trust Foundation, entails a different timeline than our ten-week brand and web design project, The Full Presence, because of the difference in scope, deliverables, and overall strategy. It’s important to know your timeline and its driver at the start of the conversation to ensure the scope matches what's actually possible.
4. What isn't working about the current brand?
This question is not about aesthetics, but about what deficits the brand has. What is the brand currently failing to do? Who is it failing to reach? Where is it creating friction or confusion? The answer to this question gives the designer the problem to solve rather than leaving them to guess at the brief from visual preferences.
5. What does success look like a year after the project?
This question is about deciding the end-goal; what would be true about the organization, including its patient or donor relationships, its staff capacity to execute consistent materials, its public presence, if the brand project was successful? This question shifts the evaluation from whether the website or logo look good, to whether the project actually moved the organization toward achieving its goals.
What the right designer asks
A designer who asks most of these questions, rather than starting the conversation with a portfolio presentation and pricing, is a designer who understands that good brand work starts with a strategic process, not just what looks ‘good’.
Take the next step
If your organization is thinking about a brand project in 2027, start with the free Website Checklist, 10 questions that help you identify the gaps.
→ Get it free at wellfolkdesign.com/resources