Two simple rules for working with designers for non-designers

Respect them and they will hate you less.

Two simple rules:

1. If you have time and money, let the designers do the thinking for you.
2. If you don’t have time nor money, do the thinking yourself and then explain it in as much detail as possible to the designer.

It is similar to this gif, but you should add one more option: “don’t think”.

I learned this rule during my first year as a project manager at Granat marketing agency. I expected designers to be some kind of crazy passionate genius artist — I would just vaguely describe the idea to one of them, she would do some introspective brainstorming and in a few hours I will have a great, polished work that I usually receive from Muzli in my inbox.

Well, if I want this to happen on a project I need to give them TIME. But if a project’s deadline is too close, here is the design thinking and work that I should do, before sending them the tasks in Basecamp.

• Think about the goal of the finished work (be it a landing page, a series of social media posts, or a facebook cover). What parts matter more than others? What cannot miss? What can I eliminate?
• Research the topic, look for examples, get inspiration from multiple sources.
• Make a sketch, think about the colours, the structure, the design consistency. Will it be clear from the first glance that this work belongs to this or that brand?

And most importantly:

• Write everything down in as many details as possible. And please please please don’t forget to include such simple, obvious things as the sizes of the images. You don’t know how much a designer appreciates when a project manager includes sizes even of the social media posts that they work with day by day. But if you include these tiny little details, they know that you CARE and they will hate you less 😇

In other words, don’t make them think. But if you want them to think, give them more money and more time. Don’t be a d*ck. Respect these two rules.

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