Stylescapes®

What if you knew exactly what your client wanted?

You’ve just landed your biggest design project to date. Your client gives you some key words to base your work off of: modern, clean, and simple. Surely, you know what those words mean and what they look like, and obviously the client does, too.

You both talked about it.

You break from the creative brief and get moving. For weeks, you pour your heart and soul into every little piece of this project. You’re confident that this is your best work yet. This is going to blow your client away.

Fast forward to presentation day, and you’re pumped up. You're ready to watch your client collect their jaw from the floor.

Then they utter the words that punch you right in the gut.

“This isn’t what I pictured at all. This is not what we talked about. What else do you have to show me?”

How is that possible? Why did they suddenly realize that what you’ve shown them isn’t what they want?

Your client didn’t just suddenly decide that—you were never aligned on the visual direction to begin with. All of a sudden, you start to feel it:

“This client is a nightmare. They don’t understand design. They don’t understand my process.”

Yes, some clients are tough. You might not always see eye to eye. But we can’t read their minds. (Even though that'd be pretty sweet.) We have to know how to speak the same language.

Your process is missing something vital.

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What’s a Stylescapes®?

You might know them as mood boards, style tiles, or tear sheets. A Stylescape is a curated collection of images, textures, typography, and colors that communicate a certain look and feel. It defines the visual direction and gives clients a crystal-clear picture of the deliverables ahead.

Stylescapes are designed to be shared with clients before the visual design phase to make sure everyone’s in agreement with the direction. When you and the client sign off on a modern, clean, and simple design, you have a visual reference tool to communicate exactly what that might look like.

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How have Stylescapes® helped us?

“Our team used to spend hours upon hours working on detailed design ideas, only to be course-corrected by clients. Clients sometimes felt uncomfortable to comment on work because of how finished everything looked. And it was always at the 11th hour that clients changed their minds.”

“Since incorporating Stylescapes, we get buy-in early on or we don’t proceed. It’s a great gut check that helps our team and clients get aligned in days, not weeks. If clients want to change something, we can quickly adjust within 24 hours. And because Stylescapes are made so quickly, we can explore a broader range of styles and approaches we wouldn’t normally try. It's been liberating to maintain our creative freedom.”

— Chris Do, Founder and Executive Creative Director of Blind

Stylescapes yield seriously positive relationships. They allow you and your client to collaborate and exchange ideas to move the project forward smoothly. Clients feel like their input and involvement is valued, and trust you'll deliver something great.

“Someone took the idea that I’ve been going for, and here it is on a board. And I go, ‘oh, I like that.’ This was extremely helpful for us.”

—Josh Hamilton of Hamilton Family Brewery, a former client of Blind

You might be thinking, “OK...how is this different from what I’m doing now?”

Do you sometimes feel like you and your client are from different worlds, where you just don’t get each other? Or feel nervous every time you present your designs, and let them take over when they’re not happy with what you’ve made?

Instead of making progress, you start running in a hamster wheel of revisions. It’s soul-crushing as a designer to become your client’s—or boss’s—puppet. You can’t figure out what they want, so you rely on them to tell you.

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Information is bound to get lost in translation.

You could ask clients loads of questions but never get clarity on their answers. What 'modern' means to you, could mean something completely different to them. You'd end each brief with a lot of unclear objectives.

And that won't end well. Each project then turns into a constant guessing game of trying to figure out what clients really mean.

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But we can stop guessing, and start knowing.

Stylescapes help to close the imagination gap and get clients to see what you see. Both parties can get on the same page about the design direction from the get-go, and have something to reference throughout the project.

As designers, it’s easy for us to imagine what something will look like. Sometimes it’s hard to explain our ideas without going the extra mile. But with Stylescapes, you’ll dodge unnecessary, added work and hit your client’s expectations on the mark.

If you're tired of designing with headaches and feeling trapped in an abyss of revisions, this is the course for you.

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