People are sometimes surprised by how much talking happens before I open a single design program. There’s a version of this job that exists mostly in people’s heads where a designer hears “I need a logo” and just starts making things, guided by pure creative instinct. That’s not really how it works, at least not for me, and definitely not for anything meant to last longer than a season. So here’s an honest walkthrough of what actually happens on a design brief call.
First, I ask about the business, not the design. What do you actually do, day to day? Who’s your ideal customer, and what does a good day look like for them before and after they find you? What made you start this in the first place? None of these questions have an obvious visual answer, but every one of them ends up shaping a decision later — the color palette, the tone, whether the whole thing should feel playful or polished or somewhere in between.
Then we talk about what’s already working (or not). If there’s an existing logo, website, or set of materials, I want to know what you’d keep and what you’d burn to the ground given the chance. Old materials are useful even when they’re bad — they tell me what to avoid, and sometimes there’s a detail worth rescuing that the client themselves has stopped noticing.
I ask for references, and I mean it when I say “anything.” Not just other logos. Restaurant menus, movie posters, a candle label you liked, an old book cover, literally anything visual you’ve had a reaction to. Taste shows up in unexpected places, and it tells me more than a Pinterest board of fifty other logos usually does, because those often just show me what other designers decided, not what you actually respond to.
We talk numbers and timeline honestly, upfront, no vague “let’s see how it goes.” What’s the budget range, what’s the deadline, is this tied to a launch date or an event. I’d rather know the real constraints on day one than find out three revisions in that the timeline was actually much tighter than I thought.
Then, and only then, do I start sketching. Usually by hand first, actual pencil and paper, before anything touches a screen. It’s faster for me to rule out bad directions that way, and it keeps me from getting anchored too early to one polished-looking option that might not actually be the strongest concept.
A few things clients are sometimes surprised to learn are part of this process:
- I’ll ask what you don’t want almost as much as what you do.
- I take note of how you talk about your own business — the actual words you use — because that language often ends up echoed somewhere in the visual identity.
- I always ask about your competitors, not to copy them, but so I know what to deliberately not look like.
By the time I actually open my design software, I usually already have a pretty clear sense of where this is headed. The sketching and mockups feel less like guessing and more like translating — because the real creative work already happened in that first conversation, even though it didn’t look like “designing” at the time.
A few more things that tend to come up on these calls that people don’t always expect: I ask about how you personally make decisions — are you someone who wants three distinct concepts to react to, or would you rather see one strong direction refined carefully rather than splitting attention across multiple options? Neither approach is wrong, but knowing which one fits you upfront changes how I structure the whole project, and saves us both from a mismatched process that leaves you either overwhelmed with too many options or feeling boxed in by too few.
I also ask, gently, about past design experiences — good or bad. If someone’s been burned before by a rushed logo maker result or a designer who didn’t listen well, that context genuinely changes how I approach the relationship, not just the visuals. Trust that’s been dinged once needs to be rebuilt a little more deliberately, and I’d rather know that going in than discover it three rounds into revisions when a small, normal piece of feedback suddenly reads as a much bigger red flag than it actually is.
By the end of a good brief call, both of us should feel like we actually know each other a little — not just the business on paper, but the person behind it. That part isn’t small talk. It’s the actual foundation the whole design process gets built on top of.