the leap from creating a design project to a design ecosystem
By: Leonid Stern
Tags: App Design, Design System, Web Design, Visual Identity

Would you like to know our secret to transforming a regular design-process into a visual brand ecosystem that will save time on development as well as decrease costs of all upcoming visual and marketing brand projects?

The visual eco-system is a powerful foundation that could help you with the above-mentioned points. With a single project example, I’m going to share with you how a designer should perceive their own work and also the ways how design studios are able to secure long-term contracts with their clients. This write-up is all about work ethics, methods and processes. With this design process, I want to dish out useful knowledge to everyone involved in the design.

So, who is this write-up for?

Stakeholders

Often enough, I face confusion coming from our partners who lack the understanding of how exactly we work around our processes. This ambiguity then conflicts with our ongoing partnership and collaboration. I hope that this time around, after completely exposing this design process in detail, it will clear the “fog of war” and finally help with creating a common ground between stakeholders and designers. You will also discover a better-grounded and more mature approach to a design in general.

Individual designers and design studios

The information relayed in this think piece will likely sound more familiar to you. Nevertheless, I’m not stating that these design processes and ethics are the gold standard. I can confidently state that they are feasible within our team’s working environment and built with a fundamental, and more importantly, functional set of tools. It will be a great pleasure for me if you consider applying the provided information, and do decide to change your team’s internal processes or at least the attitude toward your future upcoming project.

Raising awareness. Get to know your upcoming partner.

The beginning of a working relationship between a design team and client starts with a brief mutual greeting and introduction. It then quickly escalates into a problem-related conversation and how design here can be a solution. Nothing out of the ordinary, just general stuff. However, this stage is not exclusively a conversation about your partner’s problems. The first meeting sure feels thrilling with each side estimating one another’s professionalism and suitability. Each party has its own personal criteria.

Personally, I’m a strong believer of “internal values” and the fact that both solo design professionals and design teams possess these as part of their culture. After several years of work in the design field, I’ve managed to formulate our internal values. Now, when discussing any project with a partner, I try to deliver these ideas in every way possible. Such a method of checking for these criteria helps me to decide whether I’m ready to get involved with a particular project.

A design studio is not busy hands.

A designer is not a copy machine. Therefore, any professional individual or studio should strive for such self-positioning. This way, a client can’t simply request a team to copy someone else’s solution. In my opinion, a keen eye, experience, imagination, vision and courage always diverge from the “busy hands” idea.

And design studio is not there to close gaps.

Sometimes you are requested to deal with the following problem: “We need to make it prettier, or at least to pull off our competitors’ level”. Such tasks have nothing to do with the actual business goals. I personally am a fan of projects that have a practical approach, those where design works for the sake of metrics and serves as a foundation for product’s eco-system.

A design studio does not partake in the competition.

If someone walks in the door wishing to compare your design studio with tens of other players on the market — watch out. Personally, I would think a hundred times before accepting an offer. Keep a neutral position instead, like Switzerland. Set yourself apart, loyal to your own precise processes and strong design recipes.

«A design studio is not busy hands, it’s not there to close gaps, nor does it partake in competition»

Values act as an internal filtering machine, helping to start cooperating with those who you can relate to, as well as to cast aside the rest. To avoid conflicts and misconceptions, you should be clear on the working purpose by providing the reasoning on why you and your aspiring client might not be a good fit. A good form of response would be recommending an alternative, perhaps a different team that can address a particular problem by providing an appropriate solution.

Does this sound like an obvious way to lose a potential client? This might surprise you, but later on down the road, these same people will most likely come back to you with a job offer. This time around they will be full of new ideas and an actual understanding of the design. Such cases often result in long term relationships.

Understanding the core of a brand, and the goal of a design.

If you’re skillful enough, and stakeholders share your vision and values, it’s time to move closer to real problems. At this stage, two documents called “Lean Canvas” and “Brand Canvas” mark the vector direction for an upcoming project and determine its time frames and successful execution. The power here lies in its simplicity. Between two designers, the one asking questions and preparing the two business-model documents will grasp the project’s essence much faster. Another designer which decides to dive into the endless documentation is the one who will end up biting the dust.

Lean Canvas gathers information about the core of a product and at this stage, the aim is to gain a complete understanding of a product. It answers questions such as: Why do people need this product? What would you list as the top problems of your clients? What metrics are stakeholders trying to influence? Information derived from Brand Canvas will be useful for a design team to find out the following: How stakeholders see their product from an emotional standpoint? How is it being positioned? What tone of voice is being used in customer communication?

But before you start, there are a couple of questions worth asking your partners:

Why have you decided to do this project now?

Such a question sobers up your partner and makes him wonder about the necessity of the whole deal. Sometimes it may sound rather unexpected. There were occasions when people were starting to doubt whether the design was their number one priority and wondering if they really should come back to it later. This question, just like sticking to your values, will help to focus on legitimate customers. Given the provided honesty and the desire for working with clients aware of their actions will yield immense rewards in the long run.

What do you need design for? Do you really need it?

The main question of the three. It helps to see if the stakeholders are mature enough in their intentions and are design-driven, i.e. if in reality they want to reach their goals through design, not just feel the high from a working process.

How is success exactly quantified?

So, how is the whole process measured in terms of numbers? What metrics should be used to precisely determine the work getting sucked up into the guessing game of “like/not like”? It’s pretty simple. The design must function as it should, while partners should aim at a certain destination, without which it may turn the whole process into an everlasting nightmare. If stakeholders can’t seem to find reasonable borderlines with their goals, the purpose of a design team is to help them determine it by asking the right questions and providing suggestions.

A general client inquiry: “Help us make a quality design leap”

Frankly speaking, a general cry-out from most of the clients reaching out is the following: “Help us make a quality design leap”. This problem prevails even if the product team has its own designers on board. Let me explain why it exists.

One of the main values of an internal team lies in a deep knowledge of their product. For a product design team, it’s often difficult to get a big picture about a design, given the fact that no one is involved in any experiments or additional side-projects. With a lack of hands-on experience, their everyday experience stays on the theoretical level. This drastically diminishes the probability of outrunning their competitors through design. It even gets worse when we consider that these brands do a complete design rehaul once every 3–5 years.

On the other hand, just like us, other independent design studios keep creating fresh designs every 2 or 3 weeks. Because of this, their view of the business part is indirect, therefore keeping their sight clear, even if they focus on one particular area or industry.

Being on the verge of the design becomes the basis of their existence and professionalism. In other words, they externalize trends in real-life scenarios. However, they have to do it purposefully. It’s not about creating an ephemeral project that’s good for one day, but rather picking the best out of trends and combining it with proven design principles. This approach helps the design to stay relevant for many years to come.

Moodboard. A secret to a design process with no revisions.

After outlining the goals, the design team pairs with stakeholders to extract the essence of an upcoming visual image. Moodboard is the main instrument that helps designers to do that. However, not everyone is clear on the purpose of this tool. It shouldn’t be mismatched with something that simply matches pictures to the mood of a client. A Moodboard is a place where stakeholders’ business meets the keen eye of a designer. The designer’s careful approach to this matching process is a success-recipe for executing a project without endless revisions. One of the essential skills of a designer is to compile a worthy Moodboard.