No Drawing Skills Required – How To Joyfully Manage Your Brand and Work With Your Creative Team

On any communicative project, strategic visual thinkers and strong graphic designers are essential to take your vision and bring it to life, transforming it into what you need and like, and most importantly, help connect your audience with your brand. Yet, creating a cohesive team of players —each with a unique perspective based upon their talent set, is not without its challenges. A smooth, thoughtful process can allow your project and brand to shine.

Here are 5 tips to consider integrating into your process for your next project.

Know your brand STORY and your target audience.

After the first meeting with your design team, your designers should have a clear understanding of what makes your brand exceptional and unique in your market. Most importantly, the designer should be able to articulate YOUR PASSION. (Some of this should be homework on their part.) Share all expectations upfront. Consider and share the goals of the project—including budget, schedule, shelf life and lifespan. Think about all aspects of communication. Will it only be interactive? Any plans for print? What about social media needs?

Create a dialogue.

A good designer should be flexible. They also should be able to think like your target audience with ease. Some questions might seem naive, but if it fills in a picture to deliver the proper brand experience, be patient. An ego-free creative can design to attract the most positive response from the target audience, solve the initial challenge and meet your goals. Encourage listening. Your designer should approach the project based upon market trends, your competitors and what will make you stand out to get a positive response. The more you share, the more ideas you have to draw from.

Share What You Love.

If we understand your likes, dislikes and preferences upfront, that helps. Go into the meeting and provide visuals of what you love: a color, a font, a photographic style, or splashy branding elements. Start a Pinterest board filled with your visual inspirations. Share where you are coming from, where you hope to go, your brand’s history, previous materials, successes, challenges, what you like about your competitor, what you wish you had done first. This is all key information to a design team.

BE OPEN.

You don’t go to a realtor and ask to buy a house without sharing your budget. The same holds true with your designer. Plus, don’t let an entire concept be dismissed because you are not fond of a small design element. Rejection is expected and part of the collaborative experience, and it is OK to tell your design team you don’t like something. However, if you discard a concept, be prepared to explain why. This is a subjective challenge. Concrete reasons and direction help keep on budget and provide clear guidance to the design team. If you are not fond of a visual element, just tell us. But keep the “I know it when I see it” mentality in check. It’s a budget buster (and could also end up costing you in quality, time and team energy.)

Make Time To Embrace A Sketch On A Napkin.

It is a tremendous gift that my career started B.C. (Before Computers). I was inspired and pushed by creatives who drew gorgeous ad campaigns in pastels, could render jaw-dropping italic serifs, and who would quiz me on font identification on public bus ads while driving to meetings. My first client reviews were presented with pencil and marker sketches. I miss the freedom of those loose interpretations. During our age of heightened acceleration and technology, the first round presentations often look better than a printed piece from that B.C. era. This can be a beautiful thing when it is a short, quick project. But on a major project with long legs, if the focus is on what the ink-jet output looks like, or how a placeholder image looks on screen, the initial idea is often neglected. The entire idea process could be endangered and something worthwhile could potentially slip away. Welcome sketches. Welcome loose thoughts and imperfections.

Good Design does go to Heaven, and it also goes all over the Internet via social media. It’s a dream to be shared in a positive light. My next blog post will walk through the function and vocabulary of the creative process—until next time!