Design as a Collaborative Process.

The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team. Phil Jackson

When you start working on a new marketing piece, whether it be rebranding or an ad campaign or a new website, you always want to hire the best people for the job each step of the way. After all, you’re the expert of your business. You know your goals for your project, and you want to employ people who can help you make sure it’s a success.

Well, you’re in luck. We’re pretty firm believers in pooling the expertise of every member of any project team to collectively produce the best work we can.

But we don’t think the role of graphic designers in any project should be relegated to just “making it look good.”

Here at Icon Graphics, we like to take a proactive approach to our role on your marketing team. Our expertise isn’t limited to graphic design. When you work with us, you get the benefit of over 20 years of design experience and successful marketing and branding efforts, offering you our wealth of knowledge and know-how to make every project a win.

We believe collaborative design produces the best results. That’s why we like to be involved in every step of the process for your marketing projects, from inception to market positioning to design — and all the way through past production.

So what does a collaborative design process look like?

First, together we establish a marketing and design direction.

Before a design project begins, we like to sit down with you to talk about your project goals and establish both a marketing and design direction.

A lot of the questions we ask revolve around the marketing direction and content messaging. We want to nail down the purpose of the piece, who your intended audience is, what production timeline we’re on, and how we’ll be measuring the response to the project. Once we’ve established those things, we tackle the design direction. We want to make sure the visual messaging supports the content, so we discuss how we can help clearly communicate your message through visual style, typography, and packaging (if applicable).

Next, we embark on the process of discovery.

Once we’ve all established the basic content and visual message direction, the project usually gets passed along to us for design. This is when our team begins the creative process of discovery.

Our number one goal at this stage is to find a way to creatively interpret and execute the established marketing and design directions to strongly communicate your message. Often, we work together as a team to research before we begin sketching and creating rough layouts. By that point, strong themes inevitably emerge, and we narrow our focus to develop them further. If we need to, we check in with our printers or our programmer to make sure what we’re proposing is feasible. We don’t want any hiccups down the road!

When we’ve solidified one or two good design options, we check in with you for your feedback. Your input at this stage is invaluable to helping us accurately bring your project to life. With your insight into your company’s and audience’s needs combined with our design and marketing education and experience, together we’ll discover the most successful overall design.

Then we lock down the details.

Once the design is approved, our combined teams can start working on the fine details of the piece.

On our end, we finalize all typesetting and imagery, making sure the entire piece flows cohesively. We double-check the copy, then ask you and your team to look through it thoroughly as well. If it’s a print piece, we communicate with the printer to finalize paper stock and finish, then obtain a printed proof for us all to review one final time. If it’s a web project, we test it thoroughly across all modern browsers and devices to ensure responsive perfection across all platforms. Email set-up and hosting packages are determined and implemented at this time, as well. If it’s an advertising campaign, whether print or social media, we sit down with you to make sure our timeline is synced and we’re ready to publish all content as soon as it’s time. Once all details are finalized and approved, we’re ready to go.

Now your project is out for delivery!

All the details are worked out, we’re on schedule, and we’re ready to launch. Ads have been sent to their publications, social media marketing campaigns are underway, email invites are scheduled to send, direct mail pieces are in the mail, your website is live and receiving traffic, and together we’re monitoring it all.

Awesome! We’re done! Right?

Now what?

Let’s wrap up the post-project discussion.

We don’t want our collaboration to end with project delivery. We want to hear from you how the project was successful. Did you see an increase in sales? Is traffic to your website soaring? Are you getting meaningful interactions on your social media platforms? Did your audience react the way you wanted them to? Is your placement in your industry positively impacted by our work together?

Even more than that, though, we want to know how you think we did. Did our process work well for you? Where did we meet or exceed your expectations, and what would you like to see in the future? Our goal is always your success — but we want to make sure the process and our work together was as enjoyable as it was successful.

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No project springs into existence on its own or in a vacuum. That’s why we believe in collaborative design. It ensures that each step of the way, your business and its customers are cared for.

Want to know more?

Drop us a line to see when we can schedule a free consultation.

Tagged: Client 101, Collaboration, Communication, Design Process, How We Work