When people think of simplicity they immediately attach it to design. Good design is simple, clear, beautiful etc particularly in the context of product and industrial design. The same principle can be applied to strategy. Strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim. I believe all strategists and designers share a common goal and that is to make things digestible, clear and beautiful. We link our skill sets to tell the right story and that’s when a piece of work can really have a powerful impact. This is visual storytelling.
Over the last few years I’ve had the privilege of working with great minds with varied skill sets and this where I’ve come to realise that design and strategy belong together. Visualising a story is what everyone naturally does, we play out scenarios in our heads in our day to day lives and we imagine the output of a piece of work before we even start it because we want it to be as close to perfect as we can. As designers we are able to express this through our work in particular when designing a vision for a client or roadmap to help them to evolve their business/ product offering. My experience with these sorts of briefs have taught me a few things that I hope will help those with the itch to create a visually appealing story.
Pen, paper, post its
It’s essential. In a world that further delves into digital obsession it’s great to take a step back and think. Get ideas down on pen and paper, doodle to create links between words and create metaphors that help you communicate ideas. This doesn’t just mean sketching, post its are also a great way of building a structure. The way I approach this is to write the story you are trying to telling in a couple of sentences and keep it on the page that way you can always refer back to it as you start to generate ideas. Once you have a brief narrative you can fill in the detail as you go along.
Metaphors
The challenging part is adding that human aspect to an often corporate, complex, business structure to tell that story of what your clients customer wants. Often when I start a new project there is a large amount on onboarding that needs to be done to get up to speed with the way the business works. The best way to do this well is when you can relate a business process to an everyday task so that it’s understandable. An example of this is when I was working with a banking client on an unusual brief. In the final week of the project instead of creating the usual deck of findings, strategy etc they wanted something else. Something that made them stand out in their business that enticed those tricky stakeholders: a high level one pager that summarised the whole thing. It was a rare exciting opportunity that ended up being a large illustration with different business parts connecting and communicating and the research laid concisely on top. When visualising it was about creative thinking. We started with a theme for the piece. Connectivity and momentum was what we were going for we decided on space, the solar system and planets. From there it started to fall into place. BAU units became space stations, the staff became astronauts, satellites represented the sharing of data, processes and ideas. It was daring, bold and most importantly easy to understand and share.
But this isn’t just about going rogue and starting to draw sea creatures that represent business people but it involves adding character to existing practices. For example, if you’re doing a storyboard to show a future journey think about the style. It’s easy to draw around some images to get a person at a computer but it’s not easy to make that person look engaged or full of emotion. Try and vary the style, a sketch approach, add colour to bring out characteristics it’s surprising what you can do when you take that risk to push creativity.
Colour
Before I joined the team here at Globant I did a fair amount of brand identity design.The first thing I learnt was to always design in black and white. If it can work without colour then it can certainly work in colour. The same applies to creating anything visual. Start with a skeleton, the foundation, the simple flow. It is this structure that enables you to communicate your story. Colour is the last thing you add to give it that well deserved finish. This is by no means easy and in my experience you are often restricted to a client’s dull rigid brand guidelines which may contain a mess of blues and greys but that’s ok! The important thing is that you use this effectively. If you have an introduction that sets the scene of your piece consider starting bold. For example, I designed a very long ‘to be’ customer journey for a bank to be printed and put on the wall and the guidelines contained two colours: green and black. The challenge here was to show progression effectively as the reader went from left to right: the beginning to the end. It proved difficult at first because I felt trapped within that corporate safety net but I took a step back and thought about ‘progression’ in general. Traffic lights, emotional colours and progress bars in UI and in the end it was the exploration that led me to explore colour tints within this pallett. Starting from a darker green and ending on the lightest. This theme then carried on throughout, Icon tints varied as the user read through the journey to isolate each moment but progress the story to show the customers improvement over time.
Start with output and format
This is something I actually learnt the hard way earlier in my career. I was designing an infographic for a web page and was focusing to much on the detail to realise that unless the image was expanded after clicking the writing was illegible. Unfortunately I had to reformat the layout and adjust the text sizes to make it work which took some time. It was from this that I realised that output and format are key questions that need answering at the start. This goes beyond print vs web but also audience. Is it for stakeholders in a powerpoint, internal teams or perspective clients. The audience can vary the way it’s distributed and shared. Something that I’ve come across more recently is also document format. If you are going to design something for a client make sure they don’t need to edit once you’ve gone. They may not have the latest creative cloud subscription to open, edit and use your expertly chosen fonts. They may want to take aspects of information as jpeg and put it into a powerpoint (trust me people still do this) even if it’s a giant poster on a wall someone may want to adapt it to digital email formats for the masses. You don’t want to be the person that left someone a 200mb Indesign file with no one with a mac to open it to change some disclaimer text.
Fail, iterate, share
Failing fast is a philosophy that includes extensive testing and incremental development to determine whether an idea has value. This can be applied to any practice but in design it’s a fundamental stepping stone to reaching your goal. As designers we are constant critics of our own work and that’s what makes us iterate and improve everything around us. I’ve lost count at the amount of times I’ve had to bin an idea or concept that I thought was the answer, it’s never the first idea but not always the last. It’s when you embrace the feedback to change and pivot that you can clearly see where you should be aiming which leads to that well desired narrative that you wanted from the start. It’s ok to think ideas are bad or not working but it’s better to try and disregard it quickly then let a client tell you that ‘you should try this or this.’
I find that sharing your work increases drive, inspiration and focus. When working in a team it’s natural to ideate and discuss things but what about when you’ve got a looming deadline and you’re the one man band? This happens and it’s easy to have that tunnel vision. If something doesn’t work, seek approval. Just because a colleague or friend is not on the same project does not mean their opinion lacks value. Talk to others, start by thinking of ways to bring them up to speed quickly so that they can see what you are trying to do. Not only may they have done something similar but it’s a fresh perspective. Do they get it? Just remember not to go round in circles by asking everyone and end up with a design by committee solution. An effective visual story should be seen and understood without thinking too much.
