What Your Designer Wants You to Know

John Konecny – Senior Art Director

Bringing an idea from concept to creative for the first time may seem a bit intimidating, and marketers may not know where to start. These tips can be a helpful guide to setting up efficient communication that translates your brand’s messaging into visual masterpieces.

Don’t be shy. You’re bringing your products and services to the market because you believe they fulfill a need more than other options. Many marketers are hesitant to make bold claims of that nature or embrace a proud tone in their visual design, but those strategies are often the most effective. Your key differentiators should be the focal point of your visual storytelling. Tell your designer why you stand out in the industry, and allow them to communicate that message with impactful, unapologetic imagery whenever possible.

Give us examples. Many people find articulating exactly what they’re looking for to be difficult, so examples can help. Whether you’re designing a logo or concepting an entire campaign, examples of designs that you like can be incredibly useful in identifying what will work and what won’t. These don’t even have to be from within your same industry. The elegance of a car ad or appealing shape of a drink logo can serve as inspiration and direction in any number of projects. These examples can help steer designers towards your vision.

Remember your audience. The one downside of bringing in examples of what you like is that it can blur the line between the message sender and the message receiver. Personal taste from the brand’s marketing team is great for building aesthetically pleasing designs, but the audience must remain at the center of all messaging. Try to think of every campaign from the audience’s perspective and build it to create the ideal experience for them.

Keep asset quality in mind. Movies can be misleading. In real life, there is no magical “enhance” button that makes a blurry photo sharper and clear. Designers can always reduce resolution if needed, but increasing resolution often results in pixelated and degraded images. Investing in quality photography is a great way to build a library of assets that are uniquely yours and open up more visual possibilities for your brand.

Consolidate input and feedback. When working on a design project, every stakeholder’s opinion is valuable. However, gathering and incorporating all opinions in an inefficient manner is the most common culprit for design projects going over budget. Building processes to streamline input and feedback between your team and the designer ensures maximum efficiency while still including everyone’s insight.

In a perfect world, implementing these guidelines would be easy, and everyone would have a perfectly efficient design process. However, we all know that is not always the case. Controlling what can be controlled and having the flexibility to work with what can’t is critical for both marketers and designers to establish positive working relationships and produce impactful creative work.