Creative world: a search for a common language

Pablo Apiolazza
Aug 27, 2017 · 4 min read

A common language

When working in a creative industry, there’s a huge challenge: communication. Even if it is not easy sometimes to communicate with fellow creatives (since everybody has its own background, education and method), thanks to theory and the academy there is more or less a consensus in how to name things.

The problems arises when you have to work with people not involved in that world. That is, accounts, marketing’s heads of department and in some cases, managers and/or owners.

One might think that people from marketing departments, account managers and other managers involved with creative suppliers know all about the technicalities of creative work. But that happens less often than it should. Usually marketing degrees go deep in the marketing mix side of the career, business and numbers oriented, and not so much in the creative side, so usually there’s a knowledge gap to be able to effectively communicate with creatives. And sometimes the gap is on the creative side, since creative careers sometimes don’t stress enough on training for the real world, and dealing with non-creative positions, talking with clients, interfacing with agencies, etc.

These sets of articles are meant to help clients, creatives and agencies. I write from the creative point of view but I empathize with clients, because communication is hard in all aspects of life. I’d love to hear your feedback about it, to make it a better reference point.

So lets try to make it better, by thinking why miscommunication happens.

Never assume knowledge

It happens all the time. You meet a client, you assume they know certain things and they assume you know some others. That, my friends, is the perfect setup for confusion and crisis. The biggest losses of money and time that I suffered came (and still come) from that problem. Assuming that the other person knows the same as me, or that I know the same as them.

I’ve lost track of the amount of times that I got involved in projects with people working in both huge and small companies (even international clients) and I assumed that they knew the creative workflow and the complications of not following certain steps, just to find out that they were making enormous mistakes, like using final deliverables to ask for feedback to their top management, wasting everybody’s time and money, and straining the relationship with the client.

The first and most important thing you can do when acquiring a new client is to explain your method and workflow. That includes how do you want to be briefed, how will you ask for feedback and approval, and how will you deliver your deliverables.

If your client don’t know the process, and the challenges that arise from that procedure, there’s a high chance of delays and more changes than needed.

Three worlds

Of course, the creative process is by its nature a flexible process. But flexibility doesn’t mean randomness. The creative process is also a highly taylored process and therefor a lot of human effort is involved in the production, so sticking to a method is less stress on the administrative side and more energy for the real work.

Of course, the creative process is by its nature a flexible process. But flexibility doesn’t mean randomness.

I’d say that there are three big worlds regarding creative language. A conceptual, a technical and a procedural.

The conceptual world

Having a vocabulary to express the conceptual world is the hardest part. That’s the part in which the creative must be more like a social analyst, and a good judge of character. The conceptual world is the one of the briefing phase. In this phase the main tool to fight against a lack of a common language is the use of references. Think about it as two people from two opposite sides of the world out in the jungle, pointing to plants, animals and exchaging names for them. “Planta/plant” “Tiger/Tigre”. References are useful because they are concrete, and easily relatable. It has nothing to do with stealing, but to create images in your client’s head to help you convey a vision.

The technical world

Once you agree to a common vision, it comes a time to make it concrete. That means that you will need things from your client, that we call assets, to be delivered to you in a certain way. That usually start from recursive assets like a brand manual, logo, palette, images and archival footage, text, translations, information, etc.

This is a hard phase, because there’s almost a 100% chance that your client knowns nothing about how you need that to be delivered. And they shouldn’t. Asking for those assets in an efficient way is a job on its own, and that’s why creative companies have people that deal with this phase exclusively. And that’s great, but when you are not a huge company, chances are that you’ll have to deal with it on your own. So you’ll have to explain very clearly what do you need and how.

The procedural world

I decided to differenciate this world from the technical one because I think that even if it could be enclosed in one category, the way in which you exchange knowledge and assets with your client can be a different issu from what knowledge and assets you share.

In the procedural world, you can find more easily a common ground, since the organizational tools from a regular company have lots of points in common with a creative company. We all have deadlines, we all have communication channels, file systems, sharing tools, etc. So it is important to agree on the communication tools to use when working with clients.

In the next articles I’ll go deeper into these categories and how to prepare for each one. Please leave your feedback and comments to enrich the debate.

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Pablo Apiolazza

Written by

Art director. Filmmaker. Postproduction and PM consultant i the creative field. Creator of @APZmedia #travel #docs #creativity #productivity

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