If you want to truly stand out from the crowd, you may want to give your digital signage a bespoke flair. And to do so you’ll probably have to find a designer who can create you some stunning, on brand, creative. Unless you already know a great one, in which case this article won’t help you. But if you are looking to take the plunge and find a contract designer, this article is for you. Here’s our recommended blueprint for finding a designer and getting some beautiful creative built that has longevity.

Step 1. Gather up your existing content

Gather up all the branded artwork and content you have, this will serve as a guide for your soon to be designer. You’ll need any new creative to match your existing brand so this is a must. At this point you’ll probably have a logo and perhaps a colour scheme, maybe you have some old flyers you had printed or you have existing menus. The more you have the higher the chance your designer is going to create something new that matches your existing look and feel.

Gather up all these resources into an easily accessible place. Whether that be a folder on your desktop or a Google drive folder, etc, it just needs to be a central place you can easily share.

If you don’t have much existing material, then find examples of design work you like and collect this, but make sure it’s clear that this work isn’t yours, it's only examples of similar work and styles that you like.

Step 2. Decide on what creative you need

List out everything you might want to do, because arguably it’s better to have the same designer build each slightly different flavour in one hit, it’ll be more efficient, not only for the designer but for you too, searching for a contractor is time consuming, you don’t want to have to keep on doing it for every little design increment.

Here’s a list of a few things to get started

• Food & drink menu design

• Event promotion

• Specials promotion

But you might have unique ideas of your own, perhaps a design for a daily quote or joke, etc.

Step 3. Work out the specific deliverables

You should make it absolutely clear what your designer needs to deliver, else it could end up costing you more than you anticipated if lots of revisions are needed. To start with you need to know the pixel resolution of all your displays. Your list might look something like this

• Screen 1: 1920 x 1080

• Screen 2: 1920 x 1080

• Screen 3: 2560 x 1440

Then add to that list any screens that sit right next to each other, let’s say screen 1 and 2 are side by side, then add that to. This is so we can display a scene across both displays.

• Screen 1 & 2: 3840 x 1080.

Now quadruple the resolution for all your displays. I.e.

• Screen 1: 7680 * 4320

• Screen 2: 7680 * 4320

• Screen 3: 10240 * 5760

• Screen 1 & 2: 15360 * 4320

This will be the resolutions your designer must deliver at, the reason for multiplying 4 times the size of your current displays is so that if you upgrade your displays in the future to something with a higher resolution, you won’t have to have your artwork remade and it generally gives you a bit more area to work with if you decide to crop anything down the track.

You’ll also need to specify a platform to have your artwork delivered on. A few examples are Photoshop, Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator, Sketch, Figma. If you’re not familiar with any of these go with Figma, it’s free and easy to use and very powerful and a lot of designers are familiar with it.

Step 4. Post a job ad to find a designer

Freelancer sites such as Upwork and Fiverr are good places to find designers. For our example we’ll use Upwork.

It’s good to start with a bit of an explanation about your business, but keep it brief, freelancers don’t get paid to read your life story but it does help for them to be able to get into the “mindset” of your business, if you “connect” with a freelancer the quality of work you’ll get out of them will be so much better.

Then you’ll want to explain each of the pieces of artwork you need to build with a brief explanation of how you envision it will look or be laid out, but don’t go too specific as you don’t want to be telling the designer how to do their job.

And lastly list off the specific deliverables so your designer knows what exactly to create.

And lastly, lastly, go back to a paragraph somewhere in the later stages of your job post and insert the sentence. “Start your proposal with the word pasta so I know you’ve read this brief”. Or change that up however you like, trust me on this, you’ll thank me later. This will allow you to quickly close off 70% of the applicants that don’t bother to read the brief and save you tons of time.

On the post, don’t set an hourly rate, else that’s what you’ll receive bids at. And add a custom question and ask for “Please share only one example of a recent similar project you worked on.”. One example should be all you need to make a quick decision on a designer, yes / no / maybe.

Make the job post visible to only Upwork users else you’ll get spammed by people that use a crawler to find potential work, these are typically low quality suppliers and not worth spending time with them.

Go for an hourly job not fixed priced. It’s hard to estimate how long a job will take and if the designer ends up spending more time than they anticipated, they will start rushing it and you’ll both end up unhappy, you with the result, him/her with the remuneration.

Here’s an example job post.

We've a small family run greek restaurant based in X (www.example-restaurant.com), we pride ourselves on our excellent customer service.

We are in need of beautiful menu and promotion designs to show on our digital signage. The designs should match our brand and feel, please see the attached files to see what our current menu looks like and please take a look at our website above to see our colour scheme and logo (colour scheme brand guidelines also attached). The requirements for the menu design are as follows.

• 3 variants of a menu design that will be shown alongside side each other on three different displays

• 3 variants of promotion designs that contain a space for a food image, e.g a souvlaki and chips and an area to show text, e.g “Meal Deal, Souvlaki, Chips & Drink for $12”

• 1 promotional design that spans all three screens and shows off the brand name. “E.g. Miko’s Souvlakis - the best greek food in X”

DELIVERABLES

All designs should be delivered on Figma. Please start your application with the word frog so that I know you have read this description.

• 3 variants of a menu design with a minimum resolution of 7680 * 4320.

• 3 variants of a promotional design with a minimum resolution of 7680 * 4320

• 1 brand promotional design with a minimum resolution of 23040 x 4320

Please ask any questions if this is unclear.

Step 5 Review and choose your designer

Off the bat, filter out anyone that didn’t start their proposal with "pasta" or whatever answer to the question you added in step 4. Save yourself a headache down the line. If you hire someone who hasn’t read your brief I can guarantee you’ll have other issues with this person down the track.

Based on your custom question about providing one example of similar recent work, check out their first example. If you don’t like it then you can eliminate that candidate. And if they provide a list of 20 examples, I’d probably go ahead and eliminate them too as no doubt they’ll cause you more grief down the track.

Give it a couple of days for the majority of applicants to come in, then you should have a shortlist of candidates. But don’t wait more than a few days as early applicants will probably lose interest and be slow to respond to you.

Now most designers worth their salt will have a Dribbble profile or a portfolio easily findable in their bio. If there isn’t one, that’s a red flag, check out their profile and get a feel for which of your remaining candidates will best match your brand and feel.

Then as a final consideration take into account their bidded hourly price. If there’s a toss up on talent then the hourly price can be the decider. But likewise do this within reason, if they’ve bidded a high hourly price, depending on your budget you might have to rule them out.

Step 6 - Monitor the work done

Be quick to answer any queries the designer may have, ideally you want to unblock them as fast as you can as they may have a busy schedule juggling different jobs and you’ll get better results if they can spend larger blocks of time on your job rather than continuously context switching.

When the final design is delivered, check it matches your listed deliverables, check everything you requested is there.

On Figma look through each of the different elements and if there are any static images added, e.g. a jpg, png, etc, download/export these as stand alone files and do a reverse image search on them, you want to check that they haven’t come from copyrighted material, else it could land you in trouble. If you do find this is the case, ask the designer nicely to change them and give them the benefit of doubt that they might have done it by accident, but you’ll know if they are being disingenuous.

If you don’t like the work they have done, provide constructive feedback, be polite and ask for something different, but give them a chance to rectify any issues.

Be careful about giving negative feedback, getting a private negative review on Upwork can kill a person’s income stream, the algorithm is brutal, so use it with care.

Summary

Hopefully there's something useful here to help you find your next graphic designer. Happy hunting