In catching up with an old friend recently, she asked me, “So what is it that you do again?” She knew that I owned my own business and I did something with design, but wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. And she’s not the first person to ask me that!
Being a graphic designer and marketing strategist (< that’s what I do!) can be a very encompassing, fluid, and currently, trendy job description. But like… what does it mean?! Let me do my best to explain!
I like to think of my role as having two facets, or silos, if you will.
What I do as a Graphic Designer
In the first silo, as a graphic designer, I work with clients to help bring their visual identity ideas to life. So, the representation of their business that people see, and sometimes see without their involvement. This translates into assets like logos, business cards, social media graphics, presentations, letterhead, signage, etc. As a graphic designer, I take the vision they have, the thing they daydream about when building a business, and I make it a reality in the digital space, and then work with a third-party vendor to get things printed (as needed). Sometimes, that vision is incredibly abstract, and I’ve even had folks describe it as a feeling: “I want my business to feel like…”
What I do as a Marketing Strategist
The other facet of what I do is the marketing strategy. While I didn’t go to school for marketing, I’ve been working in a marketing setting doing something that wasn’t graphic design since 2010! I would design when I could, but I was basically learning about how to apply design, and how to make it something effective that would meet the clients’ goal. This comes into play when a client says something like, “I want a PowerPoint deck that I can use after I meet with a prospective client that they can continue to mull over. It should have an overview of what we talked about and what I can offer.” What this tells me is how the thing I’m going to design will be used, so that I can create it appropriately and effectively. It also opens up an opportunity for me to make suggestions to the client about how else they can leverage the same piece, or how a slight adjustment might create a second version for a different application. Hence, strategy!
But wait, there's more!
There’s a third layer of what I do that kind of falls into both silos but in a weird way, and could technically be its own job description. I build and manage websites! Some would refer to that as a web developer or a programmer or a coder, but I’m not building from scratch here. I’m leveraging ready-made tools to make something that is both effective (strategy) and beautiful (design). It serves a need, it functions well, but also maintains a consistent visual representation of the business.
Hopefully that helps to answer the question of what I do! There are a lot of different projects that can fall into my job description, and when I’m working with new clients, there isn’t a lot that I don’t do in the marketing and design space. If you’d like to get some of those ideas out of your head and see if we’d be a good fit, schedule your free Idea to Execution consult with me using the form below!