Getting the Most From Your Creative Team

Here are some helpful tips to ensure you’re setting your design team up for success:

Collaboration is Key. Collaboration is a team sport and if you aren’t putting the effort into building a relationship, you aren’t putting the effort

into creating a successful outcome. Your goal is to create eye catching content that will resonate with your audience. Your design team’s goal is to create beautifully designed content that both meets your needs and reflects their unique creative style. In order to develop the best content, it’s important to continually communicate with each other and align on your goals.

Have Clarity of Purpose. What are you trying to achieve? Why are you starting this project? Understanding the primary objectives is crucial for a successful outcome. By asking your creative partners to work without a definitive destination, you are creating detours along the way that will likely cause frustration and additional time and (money!) to your project. Here are some key questions to ask yourself before sending a project to your design team:

1) What are the marketing objectives this content will help accomplish?

2) Who is the target audience?

3) What is the primary message you want to get across?

Collect all the assets upfront. It might sounds simple, but making sure you have all the assets you need BEFORE submitting a request to design is really important to ensure the best outcome. From design inspiration, needed links, messaging copy, examples of previous work, to direction from your team – make sure to collect all of these resource prior to sending over to your designers. This will enable you and your designers to always reference back to one place when questions pop up.

Designate one point of contact for your design team. When submitting requests to design you are often trying to incorporate thoughts, opinions, and ideas from many different people within your organization. Synthesizing that information into clear expectations with your design team will help eliminate confusion and removes the guess work on their end. One of the easiest way to make things clear and simple is to have one single point of contact for the design team. This will help reduce the number of emails in an inbox and ensures that one resource is able to collect all information and present it an easily digestible formation for your designers.

The best, most creative work is developed when you communicate a clear strategy with your design team. It’s important to remember, when you’re uncertain or fuzzy about what you want the final product to be, your designers will then struggle with that same problem. Ensuring you have the right resources, people, and strategy in place will help reduce the number of edits and result in work you’re proud of.