• Written by Nancy Coleman, consultant

“Is she nuts?” I wondered silently when a colleague called to ask my advice on managing design. Her reason for the query, she said, was that she was now heading creatives for a tech firm, and wasn’t sure where to start. “For instance,” she asked, “how do I know if our marketing communications is reflecting the brand properly, or if our communications — or even the brand — is right at all?”

My initial reaction was that “managing design” requires more than just a 20-minute discussion. I’ve managed many design projects at my own agency and now as a consultant, often wrestling with complicated and thorny problems that arise from both the design process itself and working through design options with the client. But after just a few minutes on the phone, I could see there is in fact a succinct overview that makes sense.

Make The Brief Work Hard

First of all, the single most important aspect of managing design is The Brief. While work for any type of branding, communication or promotion actually starts with the discovery process, beginning with defining specific goals and then gathering information, a written brief is the physical culmination of these activities. It is also an expression of the branding or communication strategies to achieve your goals.

Acting as both informant and guide, the brief relays everything to the design team and to the decision-maker, organizing and prioritizing information to help even the most unorganized or preoccupied to focus and stay on track. A most critical aspect of this point is that the brief communicates not just data, details, and strategies for marketing and communication, but also what is meaningful to each constituent.

Equally useful in managing designers and in presentations to the “client” (your boss, the decision maker or the external client), an approved brief should be literally on the table for reference just prior to and during creative presentations as a grounding force for considerations and decisions. Without it, discussions are likely to become subjective, distracted by detail and drive design work adrift.

It is critical to capture everything into a brief for a myriad of reasons. By writing down what you have learned, the gaps in your knowledge begin to become obvious and you will recognize when you need to go back and fill them in. Even more, the act of writing itself requires the kind of critical thinking – understanding, organizing, assessing – that is basic to strategic planning and designing to strategy. 

Drafting a brief is more akin to putting together a jigsaw puzzle than to writing a narrative. By outlining key info sketchily in sections and then going back to flesh them out more fully, you begin to see the relationship from one section to the next. Pay attention to what your intuition tells you about what is shining out from between the lines, and you can use your unexpected insights to triangulate information into unexpected ideas.

While the section on “Challenges” is somewhat unusual, it is extremely helpful to focus on past, present and future hurdles in order to think more clearly about what needs to be done to be successful. By acknowledging challenges, not only can you become more creative in planning relevant strategies, but you develop an unexpected facility in recognizing design that is “right on” for the project at hand.

It is important that one of the last sections you develop in your brief is “Strategies.” The key reason for this is that during the process of writing out your scope of knowledge about each of the other areas, you will immerse yourself in what is important and begin to have glimmerings of strategic ideas that are both innovative for the market and relevant to your target.

Unfortunately, many project or design managers craft a thorough brief and review it together at the onset of a project, only to shelve it during the entire design process. This document (which can and should also include visual support such as images, videos and other methods that impart information and feeling) is eminently useful as a working tool to help effect every step of the way.

Concepting

Now you are getting down to the design work at hand. Needless to say, creating design alternatives necessarily should follow the strategies that you as manager have developed (and that the client approved). All too often, as soon as designers absorb some of the information, they boot up their Macs and get straight to work at solving problems. This is a big mistake!

Absolutely require that your design team bring to you a series of thumbnail sketches depicting their concepts, and the more the better. Once you’ve seen a batch, push the team to break internal barriers and take concepts to the next level—maybe even do this two or three times until you see work that not only reflects the brief but which really moves you. The problem with designers heading straight to computers is that instead of really thinking the problem through, they start to lay out the design, decorating instead of truly concepting. Good design is only possible when based on good concepts.

Manage During The Process

Designers are for the most part independent types. My experience is that they shy from showing work in process, preferring instead to lay out on the table the near-complete solution with a grand flourish, and then be acknowledged for their great work. It doesn’t work well that way. Too often they are off-track and if you point that out at this advanced stage, the change or refinement surgery is painful to everybody.

Designing is process. You as manager need to be an integral part of that all along the way — from doling out the assignment and making sure they have what they need, to checking in with their progress very regularly, even every day if you have to. This goes for concept thumbnails, early storyboards or layouts, information architecture and wireframes, all the way through to final work of any kind.

Again, at every review stage, drag your brief out and put it on the table. Does each proposed solution address the underlying problem? Will what you are seeing be meaningful to your target segment – and not just tantalize the internal team? How have all of the challenges been met? As you can see, the brief can be your compass and your checklist during design-in-process assessments.

There’s Always More

Designers by nature are perfectionists, who are always re-thinking, always evolving, always perfecting their work. This attribute is one of the reasons that they are invaluable — because, yes, work does get better along the way. But never-ending also wreaks havoc with deadlines and budgets. You need to make sure that you work with your design lead upfront to create schedules and budgets that are workable and trackable along the way — and stick to them.

While time and financial pressures seem anathema to good design, they are a fact of life, period, and part of your success as design manager will be reflected by how well you manage this aspect of any campaign, any project. Tracking time and expenditures weekly is a must to stay on top of the design project, or even more often if you are creating a very short-term item. (Production considerations open a whole other can of considerations to deal with, to be discussed another time.) And, BTW, budgets and deadlines should definitely be attached to the brief at the least as an addendum if not part of the mandatories section.

That Succinct Overview

If there was only one aspect of your design management technique that you evolved further, my strong recommendation would be to make your brief work harder.

A thorough brief is worth every effort you put into it, but only as long as you make sure it is used during key steps of the process: pre-design, during the design process and during all considerations and decisions about the work. But here is a little cheat sheet to remember everything:

1. Make sure your brief is complete and then use it every step along the way.
2. Require thumbnails for concept review and push further.
3. Be involved all along the way in the design process.
4. Watch your yardsticks for budget and deadlines as you go.