Tips for Maintaining a Great Working Relationship with Your Creative Designers

At E. Studios, we think it’s important for clients to have a healthy and productive working relationship with our team of animators, graphic designers, illustrators and other skilled creatives. Most clients are new to working with creative designers, so we’ve compiled a few tips to keep that working relationship great and professional.

I'm Okay Cat

As a small, home grown studio based in sunny Brisbane, we want to make sure that you get the best out of our personalised service. However, it’s important to remember that as a business, we have to juggle our time, work and attention between our many lovely clients.

The best way to deal with this is if we can’t get back to you immediately, don’t panic! We care for all of our clients, and we are thinking about you and your designs. Just bear with us while we spend a little time caring for our other clients as well.

Hey! We know we’re in demand, and you may have little things you really need to tell us. But we got lives as well. Just like you, our creative designers want to sit back and enjoy life after work hours.

  • Cook dinner and eat.
  • Do laundry.
  • Care for the dog.
  • Binge on the latest episodes on Netflix.

We also want you to have a healthy work/life balance so ask yourself first if it’s really important and whether it can wait till tomorrow or be sent in an email. The last thing you want is to be that client who repetitively calls and messages past business hours, every few hours. We don’t think that’s healthy for you or our staff.

It takes time to be creative, and there’s a lot of unseen, painstaking work that goes into each of our designs. At E. Studios, you do get quick turnaround times for a modest price. That’s possible because our creative designers spent a lot of time honing their craft and technical skills.

However, there’s reasonable and then there’s RUSHED! Rushing means we have to work overtime, and really squeeze our skills into overdrive to get your design ready. It means setting aside other client work, and giving up on our evening or weekend plans.

If you really need the designs now, you’re welcome to approach us for a ‘rush job‘. It’s paid upfront and double the normal fee. This is more expensive for you, which is why it’s better to plan ahead and talk to us sooner rather than a week before your major deadline.

It’s a modern convenience, the ability to send us client notes by voice: hit that record button on your phone, and BOOM send.

However, there are reasons why we prefer written formats such as email or WhatsApp. Not only can we easily refer back to your written notes and send them around to the team, it saves any misunderstanding if your recording is difficult to hear or comprehend. It takes up more time if we have to sift through voice audio to find design details, or ask administration to write down what’s been said.

So write client notes— it helps us! We can focus on fruitfully designing rather than needlessly shifting through audio snippets.

Unfortunately, people don’t seem to respect creative designers: having clients who don’t pay or delay payment is a common problem in our industry. Please don’t be that type of client! We hate chasing for payment as much as you do, and like you, we don’t work for free and our staff depend on the Studio’s income.

We give an ample fortnight for clients to pay, so if you know you’re not able to make payment by the due date, there’s plenty of time to approach us for a business chat. We’d rather you do that, than have us play chase with you.

Lanz De Jesus
BArts & AssocDeg (GamesDev), Content Writer

14 July, 2021

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