Strategic Design VS Brand Strategy

0:00if you're a brand designer early in your career and you're currently struggling with all kinds of things like loads of revision rounds not really sure how to increase your pricing and also not really sure how to justify your creative decisions to your clients you might want to consider how strategically you're actually designing stick around let's talk about it in this video so what do I mean by designing strategically and how is that different to becoming a brand strategist and shouldn't we just do that well as somebody who took two years before I started offering a brand strategy as a full-blown service I can tell you now that you can still provide

0:38massive value to your clients by just designing strategically and not actually offering the full brand strategy solution you can still be a very high value designer without actually offering a full brand strategy solution so how do we do that well I think the first thing is to understand how strategy and design are inherently slightly different and to understand each of those roles so that we can work out how to take a bit of from both so that we can still provide high value work that is actually going to be quite impactful and is going to give your clients a sense of motivation and ownership of their brands so let's

1:15have a look at strategists and I'm talking specifically about brand strategists in this case but most strategists their entire role is to take somebody from A to B and it's usually focused around a certain goal or objective that you're trying to achieve they're essentially designers of road maps as opposed to designers of creative and their whole job is to influence where Brands and businesses move in terms of their positioning how to define vision and really how to maximize on their client personas Etc okay so let's have a look at what a strategist's role is in as pure sense a strategist is essentially there to help facilitate A

1:58Journey For A behind from point A to point B and usually defining point B is focused around a certain goal or objective that that client or business or brand is trying to achieve and really a strategist will come in and help dissect interrogate and direct certain insights and create what's called a road map or a strategy document which is going to help a business make decisions about the trajectory of that business as a whole often brand strategists have a huge influence over how a brand is communicated over all in terms of communication pillars messaging how we direct Our Brands towards certain audiences how we position the brand and

2:44how we compete strategically in a Marketplace a designer's role on the other hand is there to translate ideas visually in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and serves a certain function for a real human it's important to keep in mind that designers jobs at heart are to solve problems using visuals and the Art of design to basically make humans lives easier or better or more enjoyable so this can fall into ux design experience design Etc there are so many different categories and like I said before so many different philosophies of thought and design and we're not going to get into that today but it's important to

3:28remember that designers are there to serve a function and they are not there to just create Art For Art's Sake so how do you take the job of creating something that is beautiful and serves a function but making sure that you're making those creative decisions based off of well strategy without actually having to write that strategy yourself well let's get into that so where does strategic design come in and and how do we blend these bits of strategy and bits of design to make sure that we're designing strategically and what does that look like well it's important to note what it does not look like and as a

4:08strategic designer Your Role is not to actually influence the overarching trajectory of a company you're not there to help them redefine mission and vision statements reposition them in the market or even redefine new audiences and make clever decisions about the business's Direction what you're there for as a designer is to create a visual solution to a problem and usually if you're a brand designer the problem is the fact that they are not communicating effectively visually so they don't have a logo they don't have something to put on packaging they don't have something to use on business cards Etc it's sometimes as simple as that your role in

4:50this case as a strategic designer as opposed to a brand strategist is not to influence or redirect the brand in terms of its core function Market position audience Etc you're are not there to Define Vision emission statements like I said Your Role is simply to translate and in order to translate you must first understand and so to understand we like to ask specific questions and so really the process of strategic design starts at the basic Foundation of asking your client a couple of really well thought out questions and then it's going to be a case of learning how to listen and translate those answers into something

5:36that's going to make sense from a design perspective so without further Ado let's jump in to six of my questions that I recommend you ask your clients in the early phases of your design projects so now that we've gone over all the questions to ask and why they're super important for the Strategic designing process how do we actually do it how do we pull these insights from our clients and turn it into something that's actually usable in the design process well I'm going to come straight out and say it that the most powerful and impactful way that you can gain these insights from your clients is on a call

6:13face to face over Zoom or Google hangouts or something like that where you pretty much jump on a call and you facilitate this question and answer process it's going to allow you to do a lot of listening and it's going to allow you to take notes and to listen to a client just talk organically about their business and what they believe it's going to create much more Raw results that are based on a gut feeling as opposed to pre-thought results where the client is trying to make it sound right if that makes sense if you're the type of designer who really struggles on face-to-face calls and you haven't quite

6:50worked up confidence to do that yet it's okay there are a couple of other ways that you can do this and my next best solution is to create a workbook now I had a workbook for about a year early on in my design process and and look they were hugely valuable I now prefer doing it on a call of course but a workbook definitely has its place early on in your process and it also offers your client the opportunity to take some time over answering those questions if a business is Young it can sometimes be difficult to give some thought to these questions they can be quite challenging

7:27and so giving your client a workbook to fill in gives them some space and time to think about those questions and send them back to you you can always then follow up with another call to then go through that workbook which will kind of lessen the pressure on you and offer your client the opportunity to elaborate or explain or actually change the answers if they've thought of something after the fact it also gives you the opportunity to ask questions if something doesn't make sense to you so once you've gathered those answers and you have your insights all in one place you want to make sure that you're

8:02actually using it to then feed feedback to the client or what you've heard to make sure that you've translated it accurately before you move into design so what I recommend you do is that you pull it all together into a PDF you can do it in a Word document and then export it as a PDF and you call it the brand Direction document so no we're not creating a robust brand strategy but it's going to give you a really strong foundation for design and I promise it's going to reduce those revision rounds if you can then learn how to apply the design and justify it from that

8:38direction document it's really really important that you then take your client through that document or Insight stock to basically check that you've heard them correctly I cannot stress that one of the most important things throughout the brand identity design process is checking in with your client that you've translated what they've said and felt accurately you always want to be checking in have I heard you correctly this is what I understand you to have said in this case this is what I hear is really important to you and it doesn't take you being a fully qualified brand strategist to learn to listen to your clients really effectively and then to

9:17feed back what you're hearing it's going to give the client an opportunity to validate or explain again or to create Clarity if there's missed missed opportunities or something that you haven't translated totally accurately this is going to give you such a strong foundation for your design and again is going to reduce the likelihood of your client pushing back or relying on subjectivity when giving feedback you can take things one step further and when you present this brand Direction document it's actually a great opportunity to now present creative Direction alongside that and this is how I used to do it for a very long time when I was creating these brand

9:57Direction documents I made sure to then also create a mood board or two mood boards to present along with that and say here have a look at how I've understood what you've said to me and what that looks like in terms of creative inspiration it's a really nice founding point and it's a really good place to start with your client and connect the storytelling and conversation to design so you can build in two or three rounds of versions on the mood board so that you actually get a chance to really build that out but it's a good place to start linking strategic thinking with your design

10:34process it's key to keep in mind that there's a number of questions you can ask your clients but in my experience I found that these six questions really give me really great insight into a client's brand and business and the story they're trying to tell and that in and of itself allows me to make decisions creatively about how I'm going to design their logo or their brand identity elements in such a way that they're actually going to have more impact and I'm not going to be going back and forth with my clients to try and justify my creative decisions because I can anchor them on research

11:11and insights from our conversations it is also a really great way to enroll your client early on in the process so that they feel like they're involved in the creative development of their own brand identity they feel like their story has been heard and you're not just going about choosing colors off the top of your head because that's what everybody else is doing you're actually going to create something that is bespoke and fitted specifically to them which by the way is going to make you more valuable so you can have a look at upping your rates once you start getting this right so let's jump into those

11:45questions number one the first question I always ask my clients is tell me about how you got here I want to understand my client's story what led them to starting their business what have they done up into this point what are the challenges that they're currently experiencing and how have we gotten here to this point today with us speaking to me about rebranding or creating an identity for their business you want to make sure that you give your clients lots of space to talk about this and ask them a few other clarifying questions don't let the question get too far away you want to give it about 10 or 15 minutes make sure

12:21you're taking notes and paying attention for any gold nuggets or interesting threads that you can weave into the Design Story it's going to help create something that is a lot more meaningful for the client and stories are always great when trying to attract an audience which leads me to number two who are we talking to I think a lot of the time we forget as designers or if we can forget especially early on in our career that we're not actually just creating for our clients but we're actually creating for our clients clients and we need to understand that the brand identity that we eventually develop is going to need

12:56to attract an audience and we can't understand how to translate those designs unless we understand who that audience actually is so one of the key questions you want to make sure you're asking your clients early on in the process is who Their audience is so obviously this begs the question does my client actually know who Their audience is well this is where it can get a little bit tricky but you want to make sure that you're encouraging your clients to think about this you can sit with them and help them create ideal profiles and things like that and there's lots of different ways of doing that but you want to make sure that

13:31you're touching on this and you want to make sure that your clients actually understand who they are trying to sell to and whether or not they've given that some thought question number three what are they trying to evoke emotionally in that audience we need to understand that buyers make decisions based on emotion first and then they try and justify with logic later we all do it humankind do it we make decisions and we move based on emotion first whether we like to admit it or not and then we always try and justify it with logic later so keeping in mind you can actually leverage that as a business and as a brand and you as

14:10a strategic designer need to help your clients understand that we need to lead with emotion and design is emotional by Nature color has got different feelings that it evokes fonts evoke certain types of feelings and so you want to understand what those feelings are that we're trying to create so that we can make strategic decisions about the design choices like font selections and color selections graphic Styles photography Etc all of it's going to come down to what we're trying to make the audience feel and you want to get your client to start articulating what that might be so a nice way to help them do this is to actually have a couple of

14:49examples of how emotion influences design and color theory is one of the easiest ways to do that if you're wanting to understand color we have a freebie in the description below that you can check out question number four and one of my personal favorites is the persona location of brand and really making sure that you're bringing in the identity and one of the best ways to do this is to actually ask your client if the brand was a living breathing person or walking around on the street and you could invite them for coffee what would that person look like behave like talk like dress like what are their favorite

15:24colors what do they like to eat on the weekends you know what are they like as a person are they fun loving and carefree are they super serious you want to ask them to start thinking about this now if you're the type of identity designer who's working with smaller Brands and entrepreneurs a lot of who they are will be injected into that brand and as designers our sort of role is to help our clients work out where they stop and their business starts and one of the easiest ways to do this without getting too in depth into the strategy side of things is to ask them

15:59this question is to try and imagine how they would personify their brand as a person and if it's pretty much a carbon copy of who they are well that's super easy because all they need to do is describe themselves to you and you can create a visual personification of them in brand format question number five and one that might sound ridiculously obvious but one that you really need to make sure you're having a clear conversation with your clients about is what do they actually do and what purpose does it serve and this one is a particularly tricky one for service based business so if you're the kind of

16:35designer who works with people like coaches and Consultants Etc this is a key question to ask your clients because you really as the designer want to understand what your client actually does on a day-to-day basis and how that business and process works is it going to impact design directly probably not but you'll be surprised how much a greater understanding of what they do will help you create solutions for their business a good example of this is if you actually engage your client in asking them about what they do and how it works in terms of their delivery of that process you can understand how their business runs what types of challenges

17:16they meet you can actually start offering up sorry you can actually start offering up design solutions for things like collateral Etc that would support the way their business runs so then you become a far more valuable designer as well because now you're going above and beyond to understand that say for example they have quite a robust onboarding process with their clients you might suggest to them well why don't we create a form design or why don't we create a banner or something like that just to make the experience that they're already doing a lot more better and on brand remember when you're designing an identity it's not just about the logo

18:00it's about all the different places that a customer is going to experience that brand also known as touch points and you really want to make sure that you're making smart decisions about how to design those things for your clients and you can't really do that unless you understand what they do and how it works so make sure you're asking your client early on in the process and last question number six what impact does the work they do have on their clients and I'm not just talking about sort of the Practical side of things I'm talking about the real emotional impact and again this might not directly influence

18:40how you make design decisions but it's really going to help you as a designer understand what you're dealing with here and it's also going to help you manifest visually for example if you're wanting to create brand patterns or assets to understand how your clients work is impacting the End customer because it might influence how you decide to add little Snippets and storytelling elements to your brand identities that are kind of going to hint at that end result for the customer looking at the brand identity so can you create assets that they can use on their social medias or inside their mailing lists or even on a website which is going to start

19:20hinting at that end experience for the customer when they're they're looking at your clients branding and identity so make sure you're asking your customer can they articulate what impact the work that they do or the product that they sell has on their client this does touch a little bit more on the strategy side but it's a really important question to ask and I promise it's going to add a lot more substance and depth to the conversations and design process that you have with your client thank you [Music] foreign [Music]