Design is a crucial element to any marketing campaigns success. Creative is an element that is often thought of as something easy to produce. We, as consumers, know when we like a design and when we don’t. While designers are artists, they also need specific elements to build their works of art. Over the years, I have played part therapist and design champion for my internal design shops. As a creative and marketer, I listed my seven-faux pas for why designers lose patience when it comes to developing creative deliverables in-house.
- Piecemeal information.
Designers are artists who want to spend time creating, not chasing information. Many designers are chasing details because either the client didn’t have all the information together or simply didn’t think it was an “important detail.” Hello, creative brief. When it comes to creating assets for campaigns, designers need all the information at once to understand what they are creating. Piecemeal information inhibits designers for optimizing their time. Optimization is crucial to meeting projects on-time and on-budget. Unless you have unlimited resources, get your details in order.
- No clear direction.
Leading to my second point, many marketers start building campaigns without a clear direction of what they want to achieve. As the adage goes, “lack of planning is planning to fail.” Simple answers to the questions, “who is the audience?” and “how the creative will be consumed?” are immensely helpful to designers. However, marketers sometimes focus on the endgame of getting the campaign complete and out the door. Or worse yet, the marketer is thinking of something completely different creatively which causes challenges for the designer. Don’t waste the designers time by not drafting a creative brief. Marketers that don’t spend time on the creative brief will inevitably not be on the same page with the designer causing issues with the direction and overall approach. This is maddening considering it is very easy to avoid.
Metscher's Musings 