Connecting to your projects and your clients is not always an easy thing to do. Often the design profession is seen as interesting and glamorous, a fun and sexy profession where you get to play on a computer and work with exciting products day in and day out, creating beautiful visual pieces. Truthfully, that is often not the case. Particularly when you are working on projects or with clients that are difficult to connect with.
Most designers know that creating a design brief and using it as a roadmap is critical to the success of a project or campaign. Asking the right questions such as, what is your business about and how does your product differ from you competitors, is a great start but what a design team does with those answers, in my humble opinion, is the difference between a strategist and a artist.
Responding to a design request without taking a hard fast look at the validity of the answers is a flat-out mistake. Don’t get me wrong, many a designer will gather the obligatory information from a client and turn out a gorgeous communication piece. But so often the client needs “a big fat reality check”, so says my friend, Matt ‘Pash’ Pashkow in our “Talk Story” yesterday. Pash recommended a brilliant step in approaching a project which I think is critically important to providing a longterm solution for a client. He says we must gather information, real information that digs deeper than the surface of what the client is telling you. Guiding them through a process of looking in the mirror and pushing through the “bullshit” and moving to a place where every stakeholder agrees on who and what they are. Pash says, “this requires a design team to fire up the jet, fly up to 30,000 feet and take a look from up there.”
Allowing the design process to begin at 30,000 feet is an awesome way of looking at any design project, big or small. I’ve heard it called ‘the big picture’ but all that does is make a problem look bigger than it is. But check this out; observing from 30,000 feet allows you to remain focused on your target and affords you the freedom to search the surrounding areas and see how they will affect the target and how it is the target will affect the surrounding area.
I love this idea! It takes design to a strategic level that gives designers, whether working on inhouse design teams or agency teams, a critical seat at the table. To make this happen, it requires you to have a desire for a strong connection. You have to know what your talking about, you have to have flown high above as to provide a broad and well thought out perspective of the course the project should take. Lastly, you have to be willing to listen, comment and lead your clients through the process, not just paint them a pretty picture.
Click here for a full hour of “Talk Story with Jeni” and Pash at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/jeniherberger or directly from my site at http://jeniherberger.com
“I was fairly artistic growing up. It is a trait I get from my mom, whose house is now filled with paintings and design work I did in high school and college. My dad had a crazy-hard work ethic and didn’t see how I could make a living in art (he was straight old school). My biggest step toward becoming a designer was when I was accepted into the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) in Birmingham, AL. To keep in line with both parents wishes I applied for both the Math and Science program and the Visual Arts program. Luckily, I was rejected from the Math and Science.
Being a good designer may be enough for some people; obtaining a degree from art school, mastering all the right design programs, winning a design award here or there, getting a job with a well known company or firm. All of these markers indeed warrant the title of ‘designer’. The question is this – is that enough for you?
