It’s a question worth taking seriously before you brief anyone. The brand work you commission will live with your business for years. Getting the person right matters at least as much as getting the brief right.
Here are the criteria I’d use — as honestly as I can put them.
Do they think before they design?
The single most important indicator of a good brand designer is whether they ask questions before they start making things.
Some designers will take a brief, nod, and open their software. The work comes back quickly. It might even look good. But it was made without understanding your positioning, your market, your audience, or what the brand actually needs to communicate. It’s skilled execution in a strategic vacuum.
The designers worth working with slow things down at the start. They ask about your business — what you do, who you do it for, what makes you different, what you want people to feel when they first encounter you. They might run a discovery session or a structured workshop. They write a strategy document before they open a design tool.
That process adds time and cost at the front end. It saves considerably more at the back end, when the work is right first time and doesn’t need to be redone in two years.
Do they challenge or just nod?
A brand designer who agrees with everything you say is not doing their job.
Your job is to know your business. Their job is to bring an external perspective — to see how your business looks to someone who isn’t inside it every day, and to push back when the brief is pulling in the wrong direction.
That might mean questioning an assumption about who your audience is. It might mean suggesting a very different visual direction from the one you’d imagined. It might mean telling you honestly that a particular approach will help you blend in rather than stand out.
This kind of challenge should feel constructive, not confrontational. The best designers frame pushback around your interests, not their preferences. But they have to be willing to have the harder conversation when it matters. A designer who only tells you what you want to hear is pleasant to work with and unlikely to produce work that actually moves your business forward.
Do they ask about your business before they talk about colours?
Colour, typography, visual style — these are outputs, not starting points. A designer who leads with aesthetics is working backwards.
Before any visual decisions can be made well, certain things need to be understood: who the business is for, what it stands for, how it sits in its competitive context, what it needs to make people feel. These aren’t design questions — they’re business questions. But they determine every design decision that follows.
If you’re in an early conversation with a brand designer and they’re already talking about visual references and mood boards before they’ve asked about your market or your positioning, that’s a flag.
Do they have relevant experience?
Not necessarily in your sector — though that can help — but at your scale and type of project. A designer who’s spent their career on large corporate accounts may not be the right fit for an SME founder who needs someone agile, direct, and close to the decision-making. A designer who only works on very early-stage projects may not have the depth for a complex rebrand.
Look at their portfolio with a critical eye. Not just “does this look good?” but “does this feel like it belongs to the business it represents?” Identity work that could belong to any company in any sector is a warning sign. The best portfolio work is specific — you can see the thinking behind it.
Can they demonstrate outcomes, not just outputs?
Outputs are what a designer delivers: the logo, the guidelines, the website. Outcomes are what that work enables: the investment round, the new market entry, the quality of enquiry that shifts, the pitch that lands.
Not every piece of design work will have a measurable outcome attached to it — some of the value is cumulative and hard to attribute directly. But a designer who’s been doing this for a long time and working closely with growing businesses should be able to point to moments where the brand work made a real difference to the business. If they can only talk about craft, ask them to go deeper.
One final test
Send them a brief and notice how they respond. Do they come back with questions, or with a proposal? Do they push back on anything, or accept everything as given?
That first exchange often tells you more than a portfolio ever will.
If these are the criteria, I’m happy to be evaluated against them. The Discovery Call is the right place for that conversation.
I’m based in Surrey and work with founders and SMEs across the UK — Surrey and South London are a natural home patch, but geography rarely determines whether the fit is right.
