There’s only one surefire trick to make dealing with freelance clients less painful.
Guess what? It’s setting expectations accurately beforehand.
As a graphic designer, the best way to do this is with a graphic design intake form. It’s a handy document you can send to your clients at the start of your collaboration. You can use it to gather important project details systematically and communicate about the scope.
Keep reading to get a graphic design intake form template, and some best practices for collaborating with clients. Let’s begin!
A graphic design intake form is a set of questions that graphic designers can give to their clients to help narrow down the project scope. Furthermore, it’s a great opportunity for you as a freelancer to present your terms and set boundaries for your collaboration.
Above all, the graphic design form should cover these 3 elements:
But there’s a lot more to it than that, so let’s go deeper.
A lot of freelancers like to freewheel. But it’s critical to make the intake stage well-structured for a couple of reasons:
“Difficult clients” is a misnomer. We should really call them “confused clients”.
Client intake forms are a great tool to help you eliminate confusion. You can use them to determine exactly what the client needs and establish how you’ll meet them. Not to mention, you can also set a firm distinction between what services you offer and services you don’t.
That way, you both stay on the same page.
To make more money as a freelancer, you need to scale your services. And scale requires you to work systematically.
When done properly, the client intake form can help you get a sense of what tasks need to be completed, and how to organize them efficiently.
To make onboarding clients as smooth as possible, it makes sense for you to build your graphic design intake form off of our template. You should customize the template to fit your clients’ use case though.
Client Information
Project Information
Scope of Work
Design Requirements
Content Requirements
Budget and Billing
Feedback and Revisions
Confirmation
According to PayPal, design is the most common freelancing skill at 36%. With so much competition, you need a way to differentiate yourself!
Writing is the most natural pairing with design services. Especially since both are required for any marketing-related projects.
More than likely, you don’t have enough writing experience to offer it as your own service though. That’s why you should partner with us at Cerebrum and join dozens of other freelancers looking to grow their clientele.
We offer white-label, productized writing services that you can resell to clients at any price you want. We even work with you to develop your own unique writing and design packages to help you land higher-paying projects.
Even when your client makes themselves clear, you need to make yourself clear. Instead of completely neglecting the intake form when a client provides a brief, simply edit your normal form
It doesn’t matter if it’s free or paid, just use something better than a Google Doc or PDF. Using form builders like Tally or Google Forms will make the process much smoother.
It’s time to take your freelance career more seriously.
If you haven’t been using client intake forms up to this point, you’ve really been restricting yourself as a freelancer. This article showed you why it’s such a valuable way to align expectations.
And if you want to boost the value of your freelance offerings, then join us to become a freelancer partner. We’ll combine your design services with our writing services to create a brand-new offering that you can upsell to your clients.
