Graphic design questionnaire: 30 questions to ask

Ever been in a situation where you present your graphic design work to clients, only for them to turn up their nose and tell you it’s not what they were looking for? 

Do you spend most of your time making one too many revisions to your work wondering why the client wasn’t more specific from the start? 

Don’t be discouraged. 

You probably don’t suck that bad at design (or maybe you do, we don’t know), but chances are it’s because you didn’t ask the right questions to get to know the client before you got started on the project. You’re way more likely to knock your projects out of the park when you get specific client input on project expectations. 

In this post, we’ll cover why creating a graphic design questionnaire makes good business sense for the design process and we’ll share 30 questions you can ask in your questionnaire along with some tips.  

You can ask these questions for many types of design projects including logo design, but if you want a questionnaire that’s more specific to logo design, check out our logo questionnaire post. 

Why create a graphic design questionnaire? 

Here are 3 simple reasons why you want to use a questionnaire in your design process:

1. Save time
   When you clarify project expectations, you save yourself tons of time on all the back and forth between you and the client as you make one too many revisions. For instance, a survey shows that creative professionals who use Content Snare spend up to 71% less time gathering project information with structured questionnaires.
   
   
2. Avoid project failure
   In our experience working with agencies, asking the right questions helps you make sure you meet project expectations and avoid project failure. Pretty simple! Do this and you’ll be much more successful.
   
   
3. Look professional
   You come off as much more professional when you do your due diligence to understand your client’s business. This will impress them, help you build a strong reputation, and get more referrals for being kick-ass. 

Now let’s get into what questions you can ask. 

Questions to ask in a graphic design questionnaire 

Questions about the client’s business and target audience

The first step to delivering appropriate quality graphic design work is to get to know everything about the client’s business and industry. Here are some questions you can ask about the company. 

1. Summarize what your company does in one or two sentences. What products or services do you offer? What are some of its values?
   
   
2. What is your company’s mission statement? What’s your vision? What’s your brand message?
   
   
3. What sets your business apart? What is your main appeal?
   
   
4. Who are your main competitors?
   
   
5. Who is your target audience? (List demographics:: age, gender, location, lifestyle, income, etc) 

Questions about the brand

A brand is your client’s personality that needs to come across in all its marketing initiatives. Here are some questions you can ask to get a deeper understanding of the brand to best represent it.

6. What are some words you can use to describe your brand?
   
   
7. How do your customers currently perceive your organization?
   
   
8. How do you want your audience to perceive your business? What are 3 things you want them to think or feel when engaging with your brand?
   
   
9. What do you like about your current branding?
   
   
10. What do you dislike about your current branding?
    
    
11. Is there a brand you look up to that you’d like to benchmark against?

Questions about design preferences 

We can’t stress enough how important asking these questions is. This section should take up the biggest chunk of your questionnaire. Be sure to ask your client for concrete visual examples of their ideas, what they like, and what they don’t like. The more input you can get here the better. 

12. To ensure brand consistency, do you have any design and style guidelines or assets you’d like to share? (font, logos, colour codes, or other design elements)
    
    
13. If you don’t intend to use existing brand colours, do you have a colour palette in mind? Are there any colours you dislike?
    
    
14. What are some must-have elements of graphic design?
    
    
15. Are there any new elements you’d like to try out in this project?
    
    
16. Are there any design styles that you really like? Please provide an example URL.
    
    
17. Are there any design styles that you dislike? Please provide an example URL.
    Do you have any preferred fonts to share?
    
    
18. What do you like or dislike about your competitor’s branding? Please provide an example URL and point out what you like and don’t like.
    
    
19. Please provide a few links or samples for inspiration / creative direction. 

Questions about working relationship 

These questions help uncover how your client prefers to work with you and what their experience has been like in the past.

21. Have you worked with a graphic designer before? What was positive about your experience? What was negative about your experience?
    
    
22. How do you prefer to communicate? (phone, email, zoom, in-person meetings, other)
    
    
23. Aside from this project, do you need assistance with any other projects? What are they? (print design, logo design, website design, apparel design)

Questions about project specifics 

These questions get into the nitty-gritty to confirm the project scale, timelines, and project goals. You can take the answers to these questions to develop your creative brief. 

24. Please state what design deliverables you need for the project:
    - Website
    - Brochures
    - Logo
    - Ads
    - Sales materials
    - Apparel
    - Poster
    - Blog images
    - Web design
    - Other (please state)
    
    
25. Where do you intend to use the final project deliverable? (print, online, other)
    
    
26. What is the goal of this design project?
    
    
27. How will you define the success of this project?
    
    
28. Are there any other specifications or details you’d like to list? (timeline, project schedule, other)

Questions about budget

Pretty straightforward questions here. Flat out ask them what they're willing to spend and if there’s any leeway. You can ask them to state a number or provide them with a range of options to choose from.

29. How much are you willing to spend on this project?
    
    
30. Is your budget flexible or fixed?

How to create a graphic design questionnaire 

Now that you have an idea of what questions you can ask, how do you go about creating your questionnaire? Here are a couple of tools you can use to build one as well as some things to think about. 

1. Online forms like Google Forms, Gravity Forms

Google Forms and Gravity Forms are examples of online forms tools you can use to put together your research questionnaire. They are pretty easy to use but keep this in mind:

They’re a bit inconvenient for the client to fill out

Ideally, you want to make life as easy as possible for your clients. And when they use online forms like these, they have to submit all their answers to your questions in one go.

Saving their work and coming back to the survey later usually isn’t an option with these tools. This can be a setback for you since it can mean there will be delays in getting your answers back from them. This can slow down your design process.

You need to use email to follow up on form completion   

The downside of using these online forms is that you’ll need to be on top of following up with your client over email to remind them to complete your survey. This can be a huge time suck!

2. Content Snare

When you use a tool like Content Snare that was purposely built to collect this kind of information, you avoid the two headaches mentioned above.

Source: Content Snare template library

Clients can fill out the questionnaire in pieces 

When your client gets their questionnaire through Content Snare, they can answer as much of it as they want to, and come back to it later. Easy peasy. With an auto-save feature built into the forms, all information is saved and your clients can complete the form over multiple sessions, picking up where they left off last. This is how designers at 1000things explain it:

“The main benefit we get from Content Snare is that we save a lot of time and, above all, nerves. It was really stressing us out before Content Snare, having to write everything by email. Now, it’s like having a new employee who is helping us to ask for the data we need.”

You don’t need to use email to follow up 

Content Snare cuts out the need for you to send email reminders. You can choose how often you want the platform to send your clients reminders then sit back and let it do the work for you. Content Snare will remind your clients to complete the questionnaire till all the information is complete and received.

Plus, Content Snare is ISO 27001 certified and uses military-grade encryption to protect sensitive client information, giving both you and your clients peace of mind.

Ready to start building your questionnaire?

We hope the questions and tools in this post have given you some helpful guidance on how to put together a solid graphic design questionnaire that will help you crush your next design project.  

Are there any other questions you think are worth asking before taking up a graphic design project? Let us know in the comments!

Other types of agency questionnaires

You're already improving your processes, so why stop at your graphic design questionnaire? Here are a few others you might like:

• Web design questionnaire
• Logo design questionnaire
• Social media questionnaire
• SEO questionnaire
• Client onboarding questionnaire