Value Engineering For Designers

There are several ways to make yourself highly marketable to your clients. You can offer services that no one else provides. You could also hones your skills to become the absolute best in your niche. You could slash prices and undercut the local market. You could also offer great bundles of package deals.

While those are all tactics that are common to help bring in customers and get the excited about your work, excitement will only last for so long. One thing that will last and keep clients coming back is if you practice the concept of value engineering for your clients.

What is Value Engineering?

Value Engineering is when you perform extra little tasks or services to make every dollar stretch for your clients. They don’t involve a ton of extra work for you to do, but it adds value to your services and gives your client the most bang for their buck.

Logo Design

Clients always need a great logo for their business, if they don’t already have one. So how do you add extra value to your logo design work? It’s really quite simple. One sure-fire way to add value to your logo design is to take the time to export their logo in multiple formats for them, so they can be applied to different applications with little-to-no effort.

If you have the latest design software, it is a good idea to save down a few versions so it can be easily opened. In the logo files package, include a small .txt or Word document, listing the fonts and colors that are used in the logo for printing purposes. This will ensure that their logo will come out looking how it is supposed to each time. You could also convert the text to outlines so there aren’t any printing issues.

Another good idea is to save the file for web as png, so they will have a transparent logo for their website. This makes sure that someone doesn’t try to cut it out of a jpeg, leaving fringe edges. This has double the impact; It makes it easy for your clients to use their logos in different applications, and your work looks outstanding in the process.

I can’t tell you how many times I have obtained referrals from colleagues of my clients, because they saw the work that I did for them. If their logo doesn’t look that good (pixelated with white fringe edges), they might think that you did that, and you just lost a new client.

Web Design

Going the extra mile for a web design client might sound like a lot of work, but there are some small things that you can do for your clients that they will definitely find useful.

Build Mobile First (If possible)

If you’re a web designer, and you ignore the mobile market, then you are helping your clients to miss out on a 3rd, if not more, of their market. With a little forethought, you could really add value to your work build building every website mobile-first. If they need a mobile site and can’t afford a separate mobile app, you can design a responsive layout that fits all screens.

This really doesn’t take that much effort. There are many different frameworks out there that will help you to accomplish this easily, such as Twitter Bootstrap and Foundation 5 by Zurb.

Set Up Clients’ Social Media Pages

Setting up a Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ account for your clients doesn’t take a lot of time. it may take 15 to 20 minutes each if you take the time to carefully set everything up. This will help them to connect with possible clients and other businesses, and is a welcome asset to any business that is interested in growth.

You can set up Photoshop templates for cover designs one time, and use that to resize and reformat their logos to fit each social media site. By setting up a specific template for each site once, all you have to do is adapt for client’s logo and graphics to fit within those constraints.

Conclusion

Value engineering doesn’t mean that you have to give your work away for free. It just means that you select a few special tasks that you can add to your clients project, that involves very little time and effort, but your client will find useful. It takes mere seconds to export a Photoshop or Illustrator file as a jpeg and PNG file, but they’ll have those ready to use where they need them.

You can wow your clients, making it hard for them not to come back and use your services again. Positive word of mouth will grow your business, which makes the return on your time that was invested well worth the effort.