4 Tips To Make Your Design Process More Efficient

I work at maform. We are a Budapest-based design studio. The other day, one of our clients asked me what would happen if he didn’t like the outcome of our work. I had no answer to that question because it quite rarely happens; in fact, that sort of thing has not happened to us in the past year, at all.

But why is that — I wondered. It’s not that we never make mistakes or that we can read other people’s minds. But we are generally lazy: we hate unnecessary work. So, we developed our own design process to minimize unnecessary phases and to get rid of development dead-ends. Our experience might be useful to others as well, so here is how we do it.

1/ Agree on the strategic goals first.

We always ask questions first in order to understand the problem and the goals before even thinking about the design. We look for the motivation behind our client’s aspiration. This is not easy, at all — the best one can do is to pay attention to every detail during personal meetings, and then take the time to connect the dots. Later on, this helps to answer some questions on our own, which saves us valuable time.

2/ Map the client’s taste.

When we work for a company, we run through the company’s vision and some of their communication materials — there are always plenty of these on the Internet. If we work for an individual or if the assessment depends highly on one of the company’s representatives, we take a look at the car they drive and the clothes and accessories they wear. We pay attention to their introduction, and spend time with asking them about things they like — these should be general preferences, nothing specific: like movies, cars, buildings, newspapers, websites and so on.

3/ We always use pictures to define visuals and emotional qualities.

A picture is worth a thousand words. The reason might sound simple: the words people use to describe abstract concepts like feelings and mood are not corresponding. This means that if two people are asked to envision „futuristic design”, they will come up with different images. They might be similar, but never the same. The more difference there is in their backgrounds, the more differences can be in the images. The solution is easy: we always make a mood board and talk it through with the client before we draw the first lines. This small effort can be a game-changer later!

4/ Define selection milestones in advance.

If the schedule is clear and the parties know exactly what to give and what to expect, then everyone is more focused and, consequently, the work is much more efficient. Also, it’s much easier for our clients to give us freedom to be creative in between these milestones if they know that they have the opportunity to influence the process. We always start with a wide variety of less-detailed designs and then narrow down the variations together with the client. This way, we don’t miss a single viable idea, and in the meantime, we don’t have to work on dead-ends. Also, we can involve our clients so they won’t feel alienated from their own projects.

So this is how we do it — it’s been working pretty well so far, and we are constantly developing our process so, hopefully it will get even better. Check out our work on our Behance Portfolio or our Website. If you are interested in news and insights we share, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or join our professional network on Linkedin