Web Design Project Kickoff 101

How to share your vision with designer

There are two scenarios of web design project kickoff. One is starting with organized assets and clear communication of the customer requests, the other is going with placeholders and lorem ipsum, hoping that the right, optimized content will happen along the way. The second seems easier, putting off the stress of delivering and handling the actual copy and images to later, but basically… that’s procrastination. A sort of procrastination that comes not from laziness or immaturity, but simply because the client doesn’t have the right understanding of what has to be shared.

We’ve worked with both types of scenarios and our internal stats show that the latter is prone to human error or dramatic misunderstanding in 85% of cases. Not pretty.

And we are not okay with our clients losing money and time, while a proper project start will literally skyrocket their customer experience and our design workflow. So we will dedicate this page to showing how customers can communicate their requests loud and clear, without necessarily spending a lot of time in the explanatory meetings.

Structuring the assets

You are really happy to get the wheels turning.
Now before the designers and business analytic dash to do research, are there any elements of current branding you wish to keep in the new version?

It can be a logo, product footage of exceptional quality, company photos, or an accent color that over the years has become strongly associated with your business. It can also be none of them. Spare a moment to revisit your digital brand, and following the famous Marie Kondo, pick the items that will serve well the future self of your company and spark joy.

Now to distribution (skip this paragraph if you are diving in 100% rebranding from scratch). Whether you are more comfortable with shared cloud storage like Google Drive and Dropbox or prefer a file transfer service, the assets (the bespoken elements) have to be structured and named according to a logical pattern before uploading.

1. Make sure to split the entirety of files into folders according to the categories: logo versions, images, videos, downloadable documents, etc.
2. Check the file names to describe their content. For example, instead of “Acme_company-new18026912.mov” go with “Acme-our-platform.mov”.

(We go over the best practices in more detail here).

Sharing the visual ambitions

This part is not mandatory, but it will be useful for clients who want to be involved in defining the next image of their brand.

Every customer starting a project with dops.digital receives a project brief: questions that will help the team understand project goals and product positioning. Based on that information designer prepares a mood board — a selection of visuals that encapsulate the projected brand. We walk through it with the customer team and edit it until the perception feels right to the client.

But if you have your own references and have chosen a certain style, why not tell about it in advance? You can create your version of a mood board to communicate your visual preferences. After all, they do say that image is worth a thousand words (but if you get to work with dops.digital, pretty please don’t skip filling that brief too, okay? ;) )

This is Milanote, a free online tool for creating mood boards. You can try wrapping up your idea of the future brand by creating a board and populating it with visuals from basic image search and from these infinite repositories of design creativity:

• Dribbble and Behance are popular destinations where both young and seasoned designers display their mockups (you can also check out dops.digital on these platforms: Dribbble + Behance).
• Muzli and Siteinspire are curated aggregators for design inspiration, that crawl a dozen of design-related platforms to gather the most outstanding UI projects in one place.
• Awwwards, FWA, and CSS Design Awards — you guessed it, these websites are the showroom for standout real-life websites. You can find both nominees and winners there, and with high-frequency categories such as Website of the Day, there is sure plenty of goodies to be discovered.

Simple drag’n’drop UI allows importing images, creating colored blocks, and commenting on the assets to specify what exactly caught your attention and how that might be useful for building the design.

Think of it as brainstorming — you don’t have to pick perfect and consistent elements that work together, or dig into hundreds of fonts to find a fitting one — that’s what a designer is equipped to do. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to gather visual associations that are relatable and characteristic for the brand as you (and your team) sees it. It might be a specific style, retro-future or sci-fi, fine art or high tech, that will show how you feel the uniqueness of your product. Everything that can’t be expressed with words, but there might be just the right picture for it.

In full candor, that doesn’t mean that the exact imagery style and colors will make it to the final design version. These are pre-existing and copyright-protected assets after all, and we deliver web design projects with a 100% authentic and custom-made look. The goal of developing a mood board is to establish maximum clarity and finding an idea that clicks, both from the aesthetic and marketing sides. You take part in it as a reviewer, you can also be a creator if you wish.

Building the copy deck

- We are going in for rebranding, and we have ab-so-lute-ly all texts &structure for the new website ready beforehand.

Literally no customer ever said that. (If you are an exception though, then:
a) we sincerely congratulate you on being quite unique;
b) you are welcome to stay on this section if you are willing to pick your brain a bit, and maybe find inspiration for future texts. It’s your call.

Not having the copy in advance is not your fault, but it can result in serious hurdles later on in the project — for example, designers building the mockup without actual texts and then being introduced to the amount of content that doesn’t fit in the allocated copy blocks. We focus more on this topic in our article about revisions and smart ways of reducing them, but long story short — project estimates credibility is proportional to the percentage of content and requirements known in advance.

The wisest way around this daunting assignment would be to actually write the darn texts.

Finding someone external to do it is one option, but it requires investing money and time to explain your brand message and proofread for cultural fit based on your audience location. Like some of the other creative studios, dops.digital can help with copywriting, saving time on describing your product or services twice, but you should be aware that puts an extra stage in the project on writing and approving before the designers can start their work.

Writing optimized copy in-house is another way, and to support you in this challenge let us share our favorite helper links:

• Hearty guide to writing microcopy* that will resonate with your audience from Nick DiLallo (*microcopy is tiny bits of text that address user or direct their actions, like section titles, button text, CTAs, and even 404-page copy).
• Laid-back yet very practical slide deck on writing killing copy for landing pages from the acknowledged content marketer Harry Dry.
• A rational how-to on creating About page from Nicolas Mérouze, which can be applied not only to the About pages, and not only SaaS products.
• Words of wisdom on how to achieve clarity in your writing. Particularly useful when repurposing old content or doing double-check on fresh texts to see if they will make sense to the reader.
• A tool for comparing your content to your competitors — Frase. You can see how it works in this short video walkthrough of exploring insights from your competition, and their free tier allows you to experiment on 5 topics per month.
• Short description of mental model for creating copy that puts your brand in the spotlight from Fio. Helps to get a perspective if you are feeling stuck with the question: “I know everything about our offering, but how do I explain it?”

Have a look at the links above to get that content ready for the design stage!

It’s a winnable challenge.

If this post resolved the uncertainty around what the customer team should prepare before heading into the kickoff of the web design project, it has served its purpose.

We set our partnership with clients for confidence and success, starting from the very beginning. Coming prepared takes the stress out of the project start, and hopefully, these hints will take your rebranding experience to another, gratifying level.

Originally published at https://dops.digital.