Process designxpart August 24, 2020

How We

Work

Both transparency and process are hugely important in building successful partnerships. Here, we break down our client and design process so you have clarity on what goes on and when it happens.

Client Process

01
Kick-off Call

Before signing any dotted lines and paying any deposits, we hop on a quick 15-minute call to outline the full scope of the project, deliverables, timeframes, budgets, etc. Typically, these are all verbally agreed upon on this call.

02
Signed & Sealed

We’ll send over a scope of work which details the deliverables and the quote we agreed upon on the call for you to sign off. Once approved, the contract, project questionnaire form, and 50% deposit invoices are shared. We can only progress once these have been signed, paid, and filled out.

03
It’s Design Time

Once we receive the signed contract, 50% deposit, and the filled-out project questionnaire form we can start our process. We will go through each stage of our design process below to get to a primary direction we believe best answers the brief.

04
Presentation

It’s now probably been five to ten days since we received all we needed from you and we are ready to present our work. In this presentation, we will walk you through every step of our design process explaining the rationale behind each decision to ultimately get to one design at the end. We’ll also send you the deck later so you can refer back to it when pulling together feedback.

05
Final or Feedback

Although tricky, it’s really important to let all the information we’ve presented to you sink in for a day or two at least before providing any consolidated feedback. Depending on the level of amends required (if there are any), we may send them over by email or we’ll present them to you if it requires more work and explanation.

06
Sign off!

After you’ve signed off on the design, we’ll share the final invoice and once that has been paid, we’ll send over all the files and exports in an extremely organized folder system for you to use immediately. We like to check in with our clients a couple of months after we complete our project to see how you’re getting on, so keep an eye out for us!

Design Process

01
Brief & Research

Once you’ve shared your brief, we begin my process by deeply analyzing both documents. This eventually allows us to distill the brief down to nine key success metrics for us to use to later asses our work. We’ll then dive into thorough research to fully understand the external challenges of your brand covering your industry, competitor analysis, and audience demographics.

02
Word Mapping

More often than not, there will be words in the brief that stick out from the rest. Word mapping is a fantastic way to take these keywords and find related words or ways to express them visually. This process will immediately spark ideas and further build on our understanding of your brand from the brief and research stage.

03
Initial Ideas

Ideas will have already started firing throughout the last two stages and now we can start to execute. This stage is ideally done very quickly; chicken-scratching ideas down as fast as possible with no real precision. Once we feel we’ve exhausted all directions, we’ll go back through the pages and highlight any diamonds in the rough to explore further in the next stage.

04
Idea development 1

We will have selected 5-10 strong ideas to develop and refine. It’s essential for us to work on these ideas on paper before taking it to the computer as we feel much freer with a pencil than with somewhat restrictive pixels and programs. Here, we intend to eke out any potential issues or ways to improve each of the designs. More often than not, one idea will be shouting at us as the winner.

05
Idea development 2

We scan a couple of the ideas we think have the most promise onto the computer and vectorize them. We’ll then experiment with typography and color palettes that further contribute to achieving the objectives in the brief. After we’ve finalized the winning design, type, and colors, we’ll create industry-specific mock-ups showing you how this design lives in your world.

06
Final or Feedback

Once we receive your consolidated feedback after our presentation, if needed, we’ll refine the design further. This will be wrapped up in another presentation if the changes are significant. Once approved, we’ll share the final invoice and after that’s paid, we’ll whiz over all of your shiny new assets ready to take the world by storm!

Testimonials

Some beautiful words from some such loving people