How long will my project take? ⏱📆

A simple question yet never a straight answer — and one that quite often gets bounced back with a “when do you need it by?”

The well-known phrase goes that you can pick only two of these three: do you want something good, fast or cheap? Assuming you’re in the market for some good design work and have an average amount of both time and budget for what you’re trying to achieve — we try and answer this elusive question below…

Weeks 1–2: Sorting your shit out 💵

You should always assume the first couple of weeks is needed to get to a place where you can really start. This time should be spent laying the groundwork and contracts for a robust project plan:

• Confirming the scope and deliverables you need. And just as importantly, specifying anything that you don’t, and therefore won’t be included.
• Agreeing financials on both sides — budget / resource allocation, payment phasing, raising POs… all the fun yet important stuff.
• Having a thorough kick off meeting, reviewing any existing assets, and making sure your brief is ready for strategic / creative exploration.

Weeks 3–5: Creative concepts and strategy 👩‍🎨

Pending what your starting point (if you’re updating rather than creating anew, if you know you have lots of stakeholders to input), you’ll need minimum a couple of weeks to sort out:

• What it looks like — not specifically, more what the higher idea is that will give your design assets direction later down the line.
• What you’re saying — streamlining and sorting your hierarchy of information so it lands across all your channels.
• How it will work — stress testing your concept across key assets to check it will work where you need it and appeal to those you want it to.

If your project scope includes design and build of a site, this stage will also include sketching and wire-framing of your web pages, and agreeing the user-flow to show how your consumers will travel through your site.

Weeks 6–10: Design ✏️

Concept agreed, your design time will vary based on what and how many assets your scope includes, and in the case of a website, how complex the build and functionality is. It’s the fun bit though — where you marry the how it looks with how it works. At the end of this stage you’ll have real tangible outputs such as:

• Your brand guidelines — so you may go forth and create further assets.
• Internal brand basics — your templates, business cards, stationary etc; everything you need to communicate as a business.
• External channel assets — from packaging to leaflets, digital banners to webpages, explainer videos and animations; you’ll get the final designs and artwork at this stage.

Weeks 10–18: Development, production & go live 🖥

Based again on what you’re creating and any other 3rd party suppliers involved, this stage could be shorter or longer, but between 2–8 weeks is a good guide to be able to:

• Go into dev — making your designs into code, reviewing and testing on a staging site and switching to live.
• Send to print — running off proofs for approval, making artwork tweaks and committing to your full print run.
• Build / produce — physical items such as merchandise, event dressing and stand builds.

Hex Studio are a small creative studio who believe good design matters. Want to chat about a project with us? Drop us a line at hello@hexstud.io to get started.