In-house creative teams: How to get more output in half the time (Part 3)
This post is adapted from our webinar presented by in collaboration with HOW Design. If you’d like to follow along, you can watch the full webinar here.
Before we jump into the last installment in this series, let’s review the first two parts. In part one, I talked about how to keep your designers fueled up and ready to solve creative problems. In part two, I suggested a few ways to streamline your creative process.
Now, there’s one big thing we’re still missing. Even with those significant improvements, there’s still a snag-and that’s the inescapable fact that designers are a bottleneck.
How often has this happened to you: Your designer takes on a new project, she’s excited to get started, and, using a strong creative brief, she comes up with a good design solution.
She exports a PDF and emails it to the account manager for review.
The account manager has a few revisions and shoots an email back.
Your designer happily makes a few changes and sends it back for approval.
This time, the account manager sends it to other interested parties, and guess what-legal has some changes, the marketing manager has changes, and one of the partners has changes. Oh, and some of these changes conflict with one another.
Legal has printed out the document, written illegible notes in the margins, scanned it back in and emailed it to the designer. Now she has to sort through all the different changes, decipher legal’s notes, and try to harmonize the conflicting edits.
Meanwhile, new projects are queuing up, and your designer is feeling pressured to get this project out the door, stat.
Oops, now there’s miscommunication between legal and the partner, and the marketing manager feels miffed that his changes got lost in the mix. After nearly endless revisions, conversations and confusion, your designer is burned out and everyone’s feelings are raw.
This scenario plays out almost every day in the corporate world. The problem is that the design process repeatedly routes through a single person: the designer.
The big question here is how do we eliminate this bottleneck, take extra workload off the designer, and make the entire process more efficient?
Integrate your design process
The answer starts by changing how we think about the role of designers in a company. We need a new design process: one that is more inclusive, efficient and smart. A silo-busting process that works across disciplines. One that recognizes the need for speed in today’s environment while keeping designers firmly in the creative driver’s seat. We need designers to break out of their isolated roles to better create, collaborate, and control their content.
Here are three tips to help your designers break out of that deadly cycle of revisions.
Tip #1: Informed, collaborative, integrated design
We’ve already established that the best work comes from strong creative briefs that all interested parties agree with. Now, let’s take that one step further. Rather than the designer being the only one who cares about design, what if everyone from the creative team to HR to legal and especially to the executive team were invested, educated and involved in the design process? I call this integrated design.
Integrated design means everyone in the company is:
- Educated on the brand’s standards
- Committed to enforcing compliance
- Prepared to participate in design revisions
Integrated design means the designer can engage everyone involved in an effective, collaborative way, greatly reducing the amount of revision time.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting design by committee. Design by committee happens when people believe they have authority over the design process, or parts of the process that shouldn’t involve them. That’s the last thing your designers need. Instead, integrated design elevates the process into a business essential, putting designers in control so they’re no longer the bottleneck.
Host a short, smart training session to review the brand standards and why they matter. Show examples from competitors of how their branding is succeeding or failing. Paint the picture for your company that a strong brand is essential to success. Then, get commitment from everyone to help enforce brand standards. That way, your designer will feel less pressure to constantly police everything your company puts out.
Show the best way for employees to give feedback. Do they need to be trained on certain software programs? Do they need to learn a little design vocabulary? Since you’ve established that strong branding and design are essential, everyone will be open to learning a new process.
Tip #2: Rev up your brand guidelines
To reduce the time designers spend on recreating work, you need to set up strong brand guidelines. And by strong, I mean that they are thorough and easily accessible.
Branding isn’t just a set of colors and typefaces. It’s a system based on a company’s core values and traits. [Click to tweet] Pointing out the logical connections between company values and branding will strengthen employees’ commitment to using the brand guide.
Equally important as having strong guidelines is making sure they’re accessible. What good is a brand guide if no one can use it?
A PDF with your brand guidelines is a good start, but it’s limited because it has to be emailed back and forth, and, if it is ever updated, you run the risk of employees referencing old guidelines. An even better solution is to have a living brand guide. A living brand guide is a centralized, dynamic system that lets your designers update the brand standards (which instantly updates them for everyone else).
One of the reasons I love Lucidpress is that it serves as a powerful living brand guide. It stores brand logos, colors, fonts and other assets, making it super easy for designers to set the standard and keep everyone on track.
Designers can set brand assets as the default settings for each new document in Lucidpress, making it super easy and convenient for employees to design with the right brand elements from the start. Since Lucidpress lives in the cloud, designers can make updates on the fly and sync them company-wide.
Tip #3: Do it once, do it right
One more story. How often do you have small, recurring design requests? For example, maybe your sales team needs a flyer updated every time they go to a convention. It’s a simple change, but for the designer, the time adds up.
What if you need to make promotional materials for all of your franchise locations, and your designer has to spend a ton of time simply switching out addresses and hours? This is a huge waste of time and talent. Your designers should be focusing on delivering great creative work, not sorting through countless edit requests.
One solution is to give everyone in the company access to Publisher or InDesign… but then the designer has no control over the brand standards. Plus, everyone will be sending files back and forth, managing their own fonts, and losing track of assets. Once again, your designers become the bottleneck.
The key to freeing them up is through cloud-based, lockable templates. Lockable templates empower employees other than designers to create and update branded content.
This is a special feature we’ve built for Lucidpress. Designers can make templates, then lock down the fonts and colors, the position of text boxes, logos and legal copy-whatever you don’t want others to change. Because it’s all cloud-based, designers can easily manage, update and find all the files different employees are working on. Anyone can customize the content to their needs without adding to the designer’s workload.
This is a huge breakthrough in the design process, and our customers have enjoyed great success in real-life applications. An art director from Reinhart Realty told us this:
“Some agents didn’t feel it was necessary to include the Reinhart logo on their content. But now that we can lock down our brand assets on the templates, agents and brokers can’t accidentally mess things up.”
The results are pretty stunning. Both Reinhart admins and agents agreed that Lucidpress saves them about 2 hours of work per week. With 160 Reinhart employees using Lucidpress, that’s 320 hours of work saved per week-or 16,640 hours saved per year.
That is the real result of an integrated design process.
Wrapping up
As a creative leader, your designers are one of your greatest assets. Focus on fueling them up, incorporating an integrated design process, and providing the tools to create great, on-brand materials. It’s the only way you can win this big design race we’re in.
About Scott Talbot
Scott Talbot is the Art Director here at Lucidpress. He enjoys dogs, long walks on the beach, and careful kerning. Connect with Scott on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Originally published at www.lucidpress.com.
