In-house Creative Teams How to Get More Output in Half the Time (Part 2)

This post is adapted from our webinar presented by Scott Talbot in collaboration with HOW Design. If you'd like to follow along, you can watch the full webinar here. In the first part of this three-part series, we talked about how to keep your designers' tanks full of creative fuel. This part is about how to get the most mileage from that creative fuel. The second practice: Streamline your process All the creative fuel in the world isn't going to help your team if you have a lot of inefficient drag that's slowing them down. Drag isn't unique; our research on design team processes shows that designers spend a significant amount of time doing mundane requests and revisions. We've also found that for virtually half of the organizations we studied, the turnaround time needed to complete a request was at least one week, with 19% saying it would take 3 to 4 weeks or even longer. That's crazy-in this design race, we have to move faster and be nimbler than that. So, what can we do? Tip #1: Clear goals As a creative director, your job is to make sure your designers don't start working on a project without clear goals that are well-defined. But clear goals can be surprisingly hard to narrow down. It takes having one vision and one voice. Give your designers a single, clear objective to work towards. You can't expect them to read your mind, or the mind of anyone else in the company. Be very explicit in what you are trying to accomplish. Without clear goals on a project, the creative work will suffer. One of the most common errors marketers make is trying to pack too much information into a single piece of collateral or ad. It's tempting to try hitting every selling point, feature and competitive advantage, but all the messages cannibalize each other-ultimately making the piece less effective. If you don't have a clear goal, your design will be full of dense text boxes competing with each other for space on the page. Even worse than cluttered design, without clear goals, there will be arguing and disagreements about the point of the project. And as you know, in this situation, designers will bear the brunt of endless revision cycles. Clear goals prevent this waste of time and talent. To sum up, the best goals are short, punchy and narrowly focused. Tip #2: Clear ownership Any given project probably has a number of interested parties, and they're usually more than happy to offer their input and thoughts. Some of these parties can be pretty demanding. It's up to you as the creative director to cut out all the different voices and determine the person who will have final approval, then focus on them. Others may have good ideas and valuable insights, but if they try to influence the decision-making process, they will only be in the way. If clear approvals and ownership are not established, the design process can get bogged down-or worse, become a proxy power battle among different egos in the company. You'll probably find some individuals pulling you aside or emailing you directly to make requests. Push back at those attempts. For the benefit of the creative team, and the company, there can only be one person who has final say. Demand to know who that is before any work begins. Tip #3: Clear creative brief The creative brief is the next step after clear goals and clear ownership are established. We all know that creative briefs are essential, but often, they're not implemented or are implemented poorly. The best creative brief is just that: brief. The worst is long and hastily thrown together, and no one considers it binding. Distilling all of the available information, competing goals and differing opinions into a succinct document is the magic that makes creative briefs powerful. The distillation process forces everyone involved to really think through the project, to voice their opinions and make hard decisions. Any disagreements about the direction of a project should come up at this stage, before any design work starts. At the end of the distillation process, the brief becomes a sort of contract. All parties involved should agree to the contents of the creative work, and all creative work should be compared to the brief. Is the creative work meeting the needs and goals outlined in the brief? If it is, great; if not, back to work. For you and your designers, the brief becomes especially important if and when disagreements arise. Then, you can point to the text and say, "We are completing what was agreed upon in the brief." It becomes a shield to protect your designers from being jerked around or wasting time. [Click to tweet ] So, if your account manager, sales team or marketing team gives you a bad creative brief, it's your job to talk to them about how to make it better. It can be an awkward discussion, but in the end, a strong brief saves headaches, revision time and frustration. Put the work in to make your briefs powerful. In the end, it's the only sure way to cover your ass. Key takeaway Your creatives can be fueled up and ready to make great work, but without a streamlined process, they will soon burn out with frustration. It's up to you to make sure they can work supported and unhindered. In my next post, I'll talk about why designers are a bottleneck and how you can open up the funnel. Don't miss it. Rev those engines: See how Lucidpress's cloud-based brand management software can streamline your creative process.