Every design project starts the same way: "Can you send me your logo, brand guidelines, fonts, and product photos?" What follows is two weeks of drip-fed emails, wrong formats, and the classic "I think my colleague has the brand guide, let me ask." The fix is only partly about tooling - most of it is asking for the right things precisely enough that the client cannot get it wrong.

Ask for formats, not for "the logo"

Clients do not know what a vector file is, and left to themselves they will send a 200px JPEG pulled from their own website footer. Spell out each item and why the format matters, in words a marketing manager can act on:

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Tip

Ask "who designed your current logo?" in the kickoff call. The vector files usually live with that person or agency, not with your client - and one email to the source beats two weeks of internal archaeology at the client's office.

Fonts come with a licensing trap

Client-supplied font files are the one asset you should not just take and use. A font licensed to the client's company is usually not licensed to you as their contractor, and "we bought it years ago" often means one desktop seat, long lost. Ask for the foundry or service name (Adobe Fonts, Monotype, MyFonts receipt) along with the files.

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Warning

Using a client's unlicensed font in deliverables puts the liability on you, not them. If nobody can say where the font came from, budget for re-licensing it - or propose an alternative early, while it is still a design decision and not a legal one.

Why this fails over email specifically

Email's 25 MB cap and scattered threads are annoying, but the structural problem is different: with a prose request ("send us your brand stuff"), each person at the client company answers with their own interpretation, across days, in conflicting versions. You end up as the merge tool. A structured intake - one URL, explicit item list, visible completion state - moves the merge work back to the client's side, where the knowledge actually lives.

Set it up once: an upload page titled for the project, with a required-items checklist mirroring the format list above. The client sees which items are done and which are missing; you stop writing follow-up emails entirely. On getfiles.app this is checklist mode - each checklist item accepts its own file, and the dashboard shows per-item status.

Look professional while you ask

You are a design professional collecting assets on a page a client will see. Brand the intake page - your logo, your colors - so the client experiences your process, not a generic file-drop page. It is a small signal, and clients notice small signals in the first week more than in any other.

Large files behave

Photo libraries and brand video run large - the per-file cap on getfiles.app is 200 MB, and originals will test it. Two things matter in practice: no compression on the way through (what they upload is what you get), and resumable uploads - anything over 5 MB uploads in chunks and continues where it stopped if the client's office Wi-Fi hiccups mid-transfer. That last part is the difference between "it just worked" and the client giving up after a third failed attempt.

Repeat clients: one page per project

For ongoing relationships, resist the single evergreen "send files here" URL. A page per project - "Website Redesign - Brand Assets", then "Spring Campaign - Content" - keeps each ZIP scoped to its job, lets each page expire when the project phase ends, and doubles as a paper trail of what the client sent and when.

If you want the checklist intake described here, getfiles.app does branded upload pages with per-item checklists, resumable large-file uploads and one-ZIP download - free, no client accounts.