Working on a Design Team – Building A Brand, Ep. 3

How do you translate strategy into visuals?

In the third episode of our Building a Brand series, the designers come together after the discovery session to break down the creative brief. The challenge at this point in the rebranding process is to communicate what was learned in the discovery session and turn that into a visual brand.

We’ll highlight what working on a design team is like, along with important steps the creative team must take throughout the design process.

What Is a Creative Brief?

A creative brief follows the discovery session with a client. The creative brief is a meeting held with the internal team to get a high-level view of the entire project.

During the brief, the team surfaces insights gathered from the discovery session. The main components of a creative brief include:

The client and project goals
Highlight the key insights from the discovery session
The design challenge
User profiles, and intended audience
Brand attributes
Creative parameters to work within
Assign tasks to each team member

By the end of the meeting, the designers should walk away with clear assignments to work on the deliverables.

The Challenge with The Creative Brief

The biggest challenge the creative directors face coming into the brief is communicating the strategy clearly to the design team. It’s really important that the language they use to convey specific brand attributes doesn’t stray from the target goal.

The creative directors are tasked with figuring out what the client actually means, and finding a way to communicate what’s in the clients’ heads to the design team.

After the Brief

Following the creative brief, the designers start researching and pulling references. They look into visual references that match the brand attributes covered in the creative brief, and see what inspiration they can pull from them.

Once they’ve gathered their reference materials, the design team meets again to share what they’ve found and discuss the next steps in the design process.

With feedback in hand, the design team breaks once again and moves into the next phase of the project: designing stylescapes. The stylescapes will help narrow down the design direction for the visual identity. To see the designers assemble stylescapes for the Hamilton rebrand, click here to watch the stylescape creation process.

ABOUT

Chris Do

Chris Do is an Emmy award-winning director, designer, strategist, and educator. He's the Founder and CEO of The Futur—an online education platform that teaches the business of design to creative thinkers.

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