AGENCY CREATIVE TEAMS: How to get more output in half the time
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We work in a race. A design race. At the root of that race lies the simple fact that the design process has fundamentally changed.
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The design process for organizations around the world is changing—and that includes agencies. Instead of a simple process where a single person requests a limited amount of design content, now every piece of colatteral you create must be well-designed and accessible for your client to re-use and repurpose across multiple teams. For agencies, the race is about who can push out the most content and the best content. Who can innovate with design? Who can present a broad, united front across an ever-growing number of media channels? These are questions we have to figure out, and fast. Additionally, we're in a world where consumers have become increasingly aware and discerning about graphic design. When a popular company changes its logo, it becomes mainstream news, bringing everyday consumers in on the conversation about what makes good design. If you're the creative or marketing director for an agency, this ebook will help you answer a critical question: With the higher demand for design and a more discerning audience, how can agency creative teams keep up with the demand to both work quickly and deliver quality content?
Your designers are given the difficult task of being creative, original and inspiring on demand every single day. It's essential that they're able to turn on their creativity when it counts. To do this, designers bring a level of practical science to the table. They're trained on hierarchy, grids, typographic theory, best practices, and so on. But to find those truly creative "lightning in a bottle" solutions, your designers will need a full tank of ideas, concepts, jokes, random facts and insights to pull from. This tank is what puts creativity on tap, ready to go at a moment's notice.
FUELING UP
Practice #1
One of the biggest traps designers can fall into is becoming complacent, using the same techniques and ideas over and over again. The world of design is rich and deep. One could spend a lifetime learning the ins and outs of all the different designers, movements and techniques, but the demands of work can stunt this learning. Encourage your designers to expand their knowledge base. This can be done through tutorial programs like Skillshare, Lynda or Udemy. On Netflix, there are many documentaries about design worth watching. There are also plenty of free tutorials and documentaries on YouTube. And even though it's not a visual medium, podcasts can be a great source of inspiration. Finally, you could offer to purchase books about graphic design, so the designers have a small library on-hand to help bust through the occasional creative block. Another way to help is to send them to conferences like Adobe Max, HOW Design, AIGA and Brand New. There, they can hear from key figures in the industry and mingle with their peers. They can keep a pulse on the state of the industry, and often, it is a much-needed morale and creativity boost. If you don't have the budget to send them to conferences, there are often local meet-ups that offer many of the same experiences. Check out Creative Mornings or your local AIGA chapter to get plugged in.
Tip #1
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Hone their craft
The world of design is rich and deep. One could spend a lifetime learning the ins and outs.
The creative tank requires a natural ebb and flow of work, rest, exploration and collection.
For designers to stay sharp, they need various inputs channeling new information into their creative tanks. Keeping this tank full of fuel is essential to solving creative problems at a moment's notice. One way to help is by encouraging your designers to stretch in ways not directly related to their day jobs. They could learn a new hobby, try out a new sport, or seek a new cultural experience. Push your designers to get out of their comfort zones. There are a million suggestions you could make: learn to rock- climb, weld, or change a car's oil. Adopt a dog. Listen to new kinds of music, travel to a new part of the world, volunteer at the local food bank. Read the collected works of an author, join a book club, take improv classes. The possibilities are, as they say, endless. Here's the catch. The creative tank requires a natural ebb and flow of work, rest, exploration and collection. You can't get the best work out of your designers if they're stuck staring at their computers all the time. This requires you, as the creative director, to limit the amount of time you're demanding them to be in the office. Much of the creative field demands a huge commitment of time, late hours and constant connection. But the best work isn't going to come from exhausting your designers—it comes from letting them momentarily step away from their ongoing tasks.
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Tip #2 Break out of the design box
Tip #3
Connect with the "customer"
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During my time here at Lucidpress, I've traveled to conferences for AIGA, HOW and Adobe. I sat in on a bunch of sessions, which was fantastic—a critical part of practicing my craft and learning new skills, right? But to be completely honest with you, the best learning experiences came from manning our booth and meeting potential customers. As a designer, sitting at my desk all day, I'm far-removed from the experience of our users. But after interacting with potential customers, answering questions, hearing their frustrations and connecting with them, I'm better able to inject empathy into my work. I'm more motivated to serve them, and I make better decisions by knowing where our customers are coming from. Make sure to connect your designers with the people you're fulfilling requests for. Bring in a few clients for an interview session and lead a "design thinking" workshop. It will be immensely helpful for them to hear all the questions, complaints, praise and criticism first-hand. You'll soon find that your designers are more invested and bring better solutions to the table.
Practice #2
All the creative fuel in the world isn't going to help your team if you have a lot of inefficient drag slowing them down. Drag isn't unique; our research shows that designers at creative agencies spend a significant amount of time doing mundane requests and revisions for clients. We've also found that for virtually half of the organizations we studied, the turnaround time needed to complete a request was at least one week, with 19% saying it would take 3 to 4 weeks or even longer. That's crazy—in this design race, we have to move faster and be nimbler than that. So, what can we do?
Streamline your process
The best goals are short, punchy and narrowly focused.
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As a creative director, your job is to make sure your designers don't start working on a project without clear goals that are well-defined. But these can be surprisingly hard to narrow down. It takes having one vision and one voice. Give your designers a single, clear objective to work towards. You can't expect them to read your mind, or the mind of anyone else at your school. Be very explicit in what you are trying to accomplish. Without clear goals on a project, the creative work will suffer. One of the most common errors marketers make is trying to pack too much information into a single piece of collateral or ad. It's tempting to try hitting every selling point, feature and competitive advantage, but all the messages cannibalize each other—ultimately making the piece less effective. If you don't have a clear goal, your design will be full of dense text boxes competing with each other for space on the page. Even worse than cluttered design, without clear goals, there will be arguing and disagreements about the point of the project. And as you know, in this situation, designers will bear the brunt of endless revision cycles. Clear goals prevent this waste of time and talent. Any given project probably has a number of interested parties, and they're usually more than happy to offer their input and thoughts. Some of these parties can be pretty demanding. It's up to you as the creative director to cut out all the different voices and determine the person who will have final approval, then focus on them. Others may have good ideas and valuable insights, but if they try to influence the decision-making process, they'll only be in the way. If clear approvals and ownership are not established, the design process can get bogged down—or worse, become a proxy power battle among different egos in the school. You'll probably find some individuals pulling you aside or emailing you directly to make requests. Push back at those attempts. For the benefit of the creative team, and the school, there can only be one person who has final say. Demand to know who that is before any work begins.
Tip #1 Clear goals
Tip #2 Clear ownership
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We all know that creative briefs are essential, but often, they're not implemented or are implemented poorly. The best creative brief is just that: brief. The worst is long and hastily thrown together, and no one considers it binding. Distilling all of the available information, competing goals and differing opinions into a succinct document is the magic that makes creative briefs powerful. The distillation process forces everyone involved to really think through the project, to voice their opinions and make hard decisions. Any disagreements about the direction of a project should come up at this stage, before any design work starts. At the end of the distillation process, the brief becomes a contract. All parties involved should agree to the contents of the creative work, and all creative work should be compared to the brief. Is the creative work meeting the needs and goals outlined in the brief? If it is, great; if not, back to work. For you and your designers, the brief becomes especially important if and when disagreements arise. Then, you can point to the text and say, "We are completing what was agreed upon in the brief." It becomes a shield to protect your designers from being jerked around or wasting time. So, if a client or account manager gives you a bad creative brief, it's your job to talk to them about how to make it better. It can be an awkward discussion, but in the end, a strong brief saves headaches, revision time and frustration. Put the work in to make your briefs powerful. In the end, it's the only sure way to cover your ass.
Tip #3 Clear creative brief
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Before we jump into the last practice, let's review the first two. In practice one, I talked about how to keep your designers fueled up and ready to solve creative problems. In practice two, I suggested a few ways to streamline your creative process. Now, there's one big thing we're still missing. Even with those significant improvements, there's still a snag—and that's the inescapable fact that designers are a bottleneck. How often has this happened to you? Your designer takes on a new project, she's excited to get started, and using a strong creative brief, she comes up with a good design solution. She exports a PDF and emails it to a project manager for review. The project manager has a few revisions and shoots an email back. Your designer happily makes a few changes and sends it back for approval. This time, the project manager sends it to the client, and guess what—the client wants to suggest changes. Oh, and some of the changes conflict with one another. One has printed out the document, written illegible notes in the margins, scanned it back in, and emailed it to the designer. Now she has to sort through all the different changes, decipher the notes, and try to harmonize the conflicting edits. Meanwhile, new projects are queuing up, and your designer is feeling pressured to get this project out the door, stat. Oops, now there's miscommunication, and the client feels miffed that his changes got lost in the mix. After nearly endless revisions, conversations and confusion, your designer is burned out and everyone's feelings are raw. This scenario plays out almost every day in agencies around the world. The problem is that the design process repeatedly routes through a single person: the designer. The big question here is how do we eliminate this bottleneck, take extra workload off the designer, and make the entire process more efficient?
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Practice #3
Integrate your design process
The answer starts by changing how we think about the role of designers in agencies. We need a new design process: one that is more inclusive, efficient and smart. A silo-busting process that works across disciplines. One that recognizes the need for speed in today's environment while keeping designers firmly in the creative driver's seat. We need designers to break out of their isolated roles to better create, collaborate and control their content. Here are three tips to help your designers break out of that deadly cycle of revisions.
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We've already established that the best work comes from strong creative briefs that all interested parties agree with. Now, let's take that one step further. Rather than the designer being the only one who cares about design, what if everyone from the creative team to copywriters and especially to the account managers were invested, educated and involved in the design process? I call this integrated design. Integrated design means the designer can engage everyone involved in an effective, collaborative way, greatly reducing the amount of revision time. To be clear, I'm not suggesting design by committee. Design by committee happens when people believe they have authority over the design process, or parts of the process that shouldn't involve them. That's the last thing your designers need. Instead, integrated design elevates the process, putting designers in control so they're no longer the bottleneck. Host a short, smart training session to review the brand standards and why they matter. Come to a mutual understanding with the client. Paint the picture that a strong brand is essential for continued growth and success. Then, get commitment from everyone to help enforce brand standards. That way, your designer will feel less pressure to constantly police everything your agency puts out. Show the best way for colleagues to give feedback. Do they need to be trained on certain software programs? Do they need to learn a little design vocabulary? Since you've established that strong branding and design are essential, everyone will be open to learning a new process.
Tip #1 Informed, collaborated, integrated design
Integrated design means everyone in the agency is: educated on the brand's standards committed to enforcing compliance prepared to participate in revisions
Tip #2 Rev up your brand guidelines
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To reduce the time designers spend on recreating work, you need to set up strong brand guidelines. And by strong, I mean that they are thorough and easily accessible. Branding isn't just a set of colors and typefaces. It's a system based on an organization's core values and traits. Pointing out the logical connections between a client's values and branding will strengthen colleagues' commitment to using the brand guide. Equally important as having strong guidelines is making sure they're accessible. What good is a brand guide if no one can use it? A PDF with your client's brand guidelines is a good start, but it's limited because it has to be emailed back and forth, and, if it's ever updated, you run the risk of colleagues referencing old guidelines. An even better solution is to have a living brand guide. A living brand guide is a centralized, dynamic system that lets your designers or client update the brand standards (which instantly updates them for everyone else). One of the reasons I love Lucidpress is that it serves as a powerful living brand guide. It stores brand logos, colors, fonts and other assets, making it super easy for designers to set the standard and keep everyone on track. Designers can set brand assets as the default settings for each new document in Lucidpress, making it super simple and convenient for colleagues to design with the right brand elements from the start. Since Lucidpress lives in the cloud, designers can make updates on the fly and sync them with every client.
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One more story. How often do you have small, recurring design requests? For example, maybe client needs a flyer updated every time they go to an event. It's a simple change, but for the designer, the time adds up. What if you need to make promotional posters for a popular lecture series, and your designer has to spend a ton of time simply switching out names and dates? This is a huge waste of time and talent. Your designers should be focusing on delivering great creative work, not sorting through countless edit requests. One solution is to give everyone in the company access to Publisher or InDesign… but then the designer has no control over the brand standards. Plus, everyone will be sending files back and forth, managing their own fonts, and losing track of assets. Once again, your designers become the bottleneck. The key to freeing them up is through cloud-based, lockable templates. Lockable templates empower colleagues other than designers to create and update branded content. This is a special feature we've built for Lucidpress. Designers can make templates, then lock down the fonts and colors, the position of text boxes, logos and legal copy—whatever you don't want others to change. Because it's all cloud-based, designers can easily manage, update and find all the files different departments are working on. Anyone can customize the content to their needs without adding to the designer's workload.
Tip #3 Do it once, do it right
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This is a huge breakthrough in the design process, and our creative customers have enjoyed great success in real-life applications. A creative director from a private university told us this:
The results are pretty stunning. Another customer told us that Lucidpress saves them about 2 hours of work per week. With 150 employees using Lucidpress, that's 300 hours of work saved per week—or 15, 600 hours saved per year. That is the real result of an integrated design process.
“Lucidpress has allowed our copywriter to hop right into Lucidpress and quickly review a piece of marketing content for our campus clients, instead of having to do a series of emails back and forth.”
Wrapping up
As a creative leader, your designers are one of your greatest assets. Focus on fueling them up, incorporating an integrated design process, and providing the tools to create great, on-brand materials. It's the only way you can win this big design race we're all in.
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Lucidpress is a design tool & brand templating platform that empowers colleges & universities to quickly create on-brand marketing materials. With easy-to-customize templates, Lucidpress cuts down turnaround time on design requests and improves brand consistency. Save time and increase your marketing ROI with Lucidpress — a product trusted by over 5 million users worldwide. For more information, visit our business page and request a free demo.
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