Talking about design: the feedback loop

Top tips you need to know when you start working as a design consultant — part 1

Starting as a designer in the real world can be quite challenging. Creating eye pleasing designs is something very visible, which creates a lot more feedback and opinions from clients. To survive the real world, I will give you some top tips on how to start working as a design consultant.

Starting as a designer

In July 2016, I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Interactive Multimedia Design in Belgium. During my studies, we needed to do an internship. I was lucky enough to get a spot at iDA Mediafoundry, and I created a car dashboard from scratch during the time I had with them.

At the end of my internship, I was offered a contract and I started my first job ever as a Digital Creative Consultant.

One thing you need to know when you're considering a carreer as a design consultant, it's that being a consultant is challenging. You need to keep on learning and improve yourself every single day. In the past few years, I have met a few challenges along the way and I would like to share what I have learned with others. Feel free to leave a comment below about your experience with being a (design) consultant.

This series will be divided in 3 different blogposts which contain different ideas used in a designer process. We start with the feedback loop, followed by tips to keep inspiration and creativity, and finishing the series witha post on validation in the real world.

The feedback loop

Gathering information

When I first started as a design consultant, my tasks were mainly focused on creating infographics, roll-up banners, business cards, landing pages, etc. In these situations your main task is to validate the collected information and create eye-pleasing designs for your client.

Most of the time your client just gives you some basic information like colours, fonts, text and usually also their logo in a png format which we can’t really use because the resolution is too small. We all know the overall design struggles in life. Those assets are necessary when you are creating corporate branding and getting the right files is always a struggle, some times more than others.

In reality though, you need more than these basic elements. By only knowing the brand style guide, you still don’t know what the client is expecting. And, in most cases, the client doesn’t know what to expect either.

That’s where you come in.

Tip № 1: Question everything!

You need to challenge your client, and ask a lot of questions to achieve an overall mindset together and to get a really good idea of what your client is expecting. Of course, your client is king but don’t always take their requirements too literally. They don't know design like you do, and it's your job to find the right solution for what they really want.

Tip № 2: Show real-life examples

By showing your client some examples, which pop up in your mind during the meeting, it's a lot easier to discover their taste and it makes it a lot easier to align with each other because your client can point out what they like and don't like and explain to you why they like it or dislike it. This makes it a lot more tangible for both of you.

When you can leave your meeting with the same mindset or moodboard ideas, you can move a step forward in your iteration process or feedback loop. By gathering as much information as possible right from the beginning, you will reduce iterations, and accelerate your overall project speed.

Create and show

After you gathered enough information, you can start brainstorming about possible design ideas. After a few days, you should have your first concepts ready for a first iteration.

Tip № 3: Talk face-to-face

My main advice in this phase would be to have the first iteration face-to-face with your client, if time and budget allows it. This way, you can receive direct feedback. If this isn’t possible, try to arrange a call where you both go through the designs via an online tool, like Adobe Spark or Zeplin.

Communication over email allows for more confusion and misconceptions on both ends, so always talk to your client directly when requesting feedback.

React and shape

After receiving the client’s feedback, you can start from the beginning of your feedback loop again by asking new questions that are necessary to adjust your designs, followed by design improvements which, on their turn, result in a new iteration.

Tip № 4: Use an iterative process

Following an iterative process like the feedback loop we just walked through, can help you improve your end-to-end experience with your customer. Your client will feel much more involved in the design process, they will be able to give faster feedback, and see the result they are looking for take shape step-by-step.

Stay tuned for the next post where I will share my personal experience with being inspirational and creative, and how you can apply some of these tips in your own creative processes.