How we made it: Service Offering Cards
Context
Perhaps using our new service offering cards as a how-we-made-it project is cheating, as they’re still in progress, but we’re pretty excited about these. Since our work is highly customized to whomever we’re working with, we’ve found that it can be hard for people to understand exactly how we can support their missions and goals.
We decided to create a little set of service offering cards that we can leave behind at meetings, etc., to give people a better sense of what to expect from our team. The structure of the cards is going to be reflected on our next website update to ensure a consistent, streamlined experience.
Figuring out our offerings
This project started with some intense self-reflection, as we had to figure out how to condense everything we do and want to tell potential clients about into a concise set of cards. We spent a few meetings playing around with potential formats the cards could take, and whittling down a looooong list of categories and offerings into a tight and manageable list.
We also spent a long time on copy and content — we wanted to ensure that we were brief enough to keep people’s attention, but detailed enough to get our ideas across. This constant content drafting process actually helped us get a clearer internal understanding of what each of us believed Inquistion to be about. We’re still editing down content, but writing all this text has been a very worthwhile exercise for us.
Our final content categories evolved into Adapt, Innovate, and Grow: we seek to help people and teams adapt to current and future environments, innovate continuously and independently within those environments, and grow their teams and companies in ways that most closely align with their missions. Within each category are cards that provide an overview of our services, the themes covered, and expected outcomes.
Deciding on a look and feel
While we’re all about having fun with work, we know that many people are reassured by things that look “professional.” This meant that we needed to find a balance between playful and respectable in our cards’ visual identity.
While we were still playing around with our content and copy editing, we also kept brainstorming through a variety of visual identities. Although we began by thinking about copy, we quickly realized the small size of the cards (1/4 of an A4) would strictly limit how much would fit on them. The copy and visual design became constraints for one another.
We decided that we wanted to use a collection of small icons as decorative elements pretty early on — these would be a good way of conveying playfulness while also giving people a stronger sense of what we do.
After a few iterations testing various layouts, we realized that our cards had lost sight of our key focus: people. We’re passionate about making work more human, so it seemed natural that people should be the center of our offering cards. Our final Adapt, Innovate, and Grow cards all use a different custom icon set, which encircle representations of the people who are at the heart of what we do.
Key Learnings
- This will be an evolving process. Deciding on how to represent your company and what you do isn’t something you’re just done with. You’ll find that there are diverse viewpoints within your team, and that you’ll constantly be re-evaluating yourself based on your projects and partners.
- Kill your babies. This (slightly macabre?) saying is common amongst people doing creative work — you’ll have to let go of ideas and perfection for the sake of getting things done.
- If it doesn’t feel right, don’t settle. I know, I know, this seems contrary to what I just said, but I don’t mean you should always chase perfection — if your team’s made a decision but something about it keeps nagging you, speak up or (quickly) mock up something new to show them.
- Get your team’s feedback at Every. Single. Step. I was in charge of creating the visuals for the cards, and I knew that showing the team various iterations as soon as I’d finished with them would prevent me from spending lots of time making something we ended up not liking or pursuing.
- Set strict time limits. We allowed ourselves to get too deeply into philosophizing about if word A or image B most accurately represented us — this sapped too much time.
Actionable Tips
- Divide roles clearly, but let them overlap naturally. A copywriter might have great visual design input, and a designer could contribute strong copy skills.
- Design quick ’n dirty. I know this is the number one boring, overstated piece of design advice, but we tend to get precious about making sure our process looks nice enough to be posted on Instagram or whatever. I super-fast made a set of pretty rough icons to play around with until we found the final card format.
- See what’s up in your space. After you’ve spent some time brainstorming your own ideas and copy, spend some time seeing how other companies in your space represent themselves. If everyone’s on a beach but you’re hanging upside down in a cave, you might want to rethink things.
