Ch. 4 The Design Process

A design concept

Is visually expressed through the creation, selection, combination, manipulation, and arrangement of image and type elements. For many students and novices, generating concepts is the most challenging stage in the design process. It is not enough to simply arrange graphic elements into a pleasing form. It is necessary to expressively and clearly communicate an idea or message to an audience through the design. Formulating a concept necessitates analysis, interpretation, inference, and reflective thinking. For any assignment, a design studio or agency must generate several viable concepts to present to their client. Being able to generate several, or in fact many, concepts to solve any given problem is a design skill.

Phase 4: Design

It's time to design, giving your design concept articulate visual form. For many, this is a nonlinear process, where the steps vary markedly as a result of creative thinking and designing. Individual factors or circumstances cause designers to follow different paths with deviations from those paths. For instance, many designers create thumbnail sketches throughout the process to develop concepts, to visualize, and to compose. There are legendary stories of seasoned designers who sketch a solution to their assignment during the first client meeting. Some designers start with visual collages. Others start with words. The following steps are a good point of departure. Soon you will find your own way of working that best suits you.

Step 1: Thumbnail Sketches

Thumbnail sketches are preliminary, small, quick, unrefined drawings of ideas, in black and white or color. Sketching by hand using drawing tools, such as a pencil or marker, or digital pen and tablet foster greater exploration and visual thinking than starting with a stock image or going straight to software. When you sketch with a conventional or digital pen, the actual process of sketching allows you to think visually, to explore and make discoveries, and to stay open to possibilities during the art-making process, and it prevents you from refining visual concepts too quickly. At first, generating many sketches may be frustrating. It gets easier with experience. Generate as many different visual concepts as possible. Tip: When you show your thumbnail sketches to your instructor or design director, it's helpful to number them for reference.

Sample design brief

What is the project title and assignment? what is the challenge? Who comprises the key audience? What is the scope of the project? What are the assignments and objectives? What is the brand strategy? How does this project fit into the broader design program? What are the schedule, deadline, and budget?

Strategic questions include:

What's the message? What do you need to communicate? Who is the audience? Who is the competition? How have they addressed similar problems? What is the marketplace like right now? What is the clients actual problem versus what they perceive it to be? What are the impediments to getting the message out and opportunities to communicate the message? What is the call to action? Donate? Purchase? Go online? Make a phone call? Subscribe? Become aware? Take medication properly? Get tested? Articulate the audiences incentive. What would propel people to take action?

Which media channels will best facilitate our goal?

Where do the people you want to reach spend the most time? Consider conceiving and designing for the media channels where the target audience spends most of its time. Budget affects media selection. For ex, a television commercial or website design requires a substantial budget.

Ideate mode

You explore paths of thinking and forming ideas, generating many concepts. Its best practice to go beyond pedestrian ideas, aiming to think past the obvious. Use critical and creative thinking to generate as many ideas as possible. Later on, use critical and creative thinking to interrogate those ideas to determine if they are worth exploring further or are useful.

Define mode

Your empathy findings inform your thinking and point of view (POV). Defining guides your exploration, providing focus, and is a reference for evaluating ideas. Defining might make you realize you need to better frame or reframe the problem. And employing your empathy findings ensures a human-centered approach- that indeed you are designing for your users and not for a general audience.

Design briefs include:

essential information, such as the project goals and objectives, the design context, audience, competition, timeline, and budget. The designer and client can measure the design solutions against the brief and refer back to the brief for guidance. Designers can use it to support their concepts or solutions. A thoughtful, clear brief can foster creative concept generation.

Prototyping

is creating a first-stage model of something from which other forms are developed. It gives an initial or preliminary physical form to your ideas, from a storyboard to an app to an object. If you can interact with a prototype, you can test functionality to determine if people can use it. You learn from the user experience to better shape it. In the early stages, your prototypes can be rough, of low-fidelity quality. Later on, you can build medium- or high-fidelity prototypes, more refined ones. Sketching is an easy way to begin.

Strategy

is the core tactical underpinning of any visual communication. It unifies all planning for all design and copy solutions within a program or campaign. Essentially, the strategy is how you are conceiving, creating, and positioning your brand or entity and aiming your graphic design in the marketplace to achieve differentiation, relevance, and resonance. A clearly defined strategy directs all strategic and creative expressions, and keeps the client and creative professionals on the same page.

Strategy

Analyze all you have unearthed to best understand, assess, and strategize to move forward with the assignment.

What do we want the audience to do?

Defines the call to action-

What is the brand promise?

Any brand or entity should have a well-defined essence, a core brand story. This allows for definition, differentiation, and positioning against the competition in the minds of the target audience. A brand is a promise.

Phase 3: Concepts

A design concept is the primary creative reasoning, the strategic intention underlying the visual communication. The design concept drives all your design decisions - how you create or why you select imagery and typesfaces or letting and the reasoning for color palette selection.

Visual brief collage board

A pictorial way of determining strategy, an alternative to using written strategy. The advantage of visual briefs is their use as a tool with clients and focus groups (in market research, small groups of people are brought together to focus on a brand or design or advertising solution). You can focus directions for a color palette, kinds of imagery, photography style, and other graphic approaches to distill your strategic goals. Client involvement at this phase aids client satisfaction because the client becomes part of the process early on. A visual brief helps a non-artistic person, which you client well may be, envision the look and feel of your design solution.

Five-Phase Model of the Design Process

Any graphic design assignment goes through several phases. Generally the five-phase model is: Research > Strategy > Concepts > Design > Implementation

What is the audiences perception of the brand or group?

Asses what the core audience thinks and feels about the brand or entity to better understand and appreciate the audiences needs and desires. Keep in mind that poeple's perceptions of a brand, cause, or entity may change.

Material gathering.. This involves:

Becoming thoroughly acquainted with the brand or entity: background, the entity's orientation/culture, core values, core attributes, information, data analysis, subject matter, history, industry, or sector. Understanding the clients goals and objectives, current and imminent hurdles, and listening carefully to the client about the assignment, brand or entity. Identifying how the immediate assignment relates to the entity's broader brand strategy and solutions (past, present, and future) Knowing the audience Making initial discoveries

What are the most critical executional elements, and what is the budget?

Determine the visual and text elements required for each project. Elements can include requisite images, color palette, typeface(s), logo, tagline (catchphrase), main text or copy, features, and rules or regulations. They can also include promotions, values, expiration dates, 800 numbers, website addresses, social media icons, and games. Again, budget will affect many of your decisions, including media, paper selection or substrates for print, and colors for print.

Client Review During Phase 2

During certain phases of the design process, the client reviews and approves the direction and efforts up until that point. Asking a client to review and sign off on what has been discussed and determined can help avoid misunderstanding down the road

Five mode design thinking model

Empathize > Define > Ideate > Prototype > Test

Empathize

Empathy sets the foundation for human-centered design, which beings with the people you're designing for and produces design solutions conceived and executed to meet their needs and desires.

What is the single most important takeaway?

Establish the single most iportant message to convey. What do you want the audience to remember, to take away with them?

What is our challenge?

Every project has a goal and desired outcome. The project could be anything from the design of a comprehensive visual identity program to a single project such as the design of a brochure. The challenge could be designing for a new or established brand or corporate merger. Clear answers to design brief questions will aid concept generation.

When you analyze, you:

Examine each part of the problem Concisely and accurately define constituent elements Organize the information so its broken down into parts that are easily analyzable Draw conclusions based on your analysis that will allow you to move forward to the next step.

For information design:

How should it function? What form should it take? What are the audiences limitations? How can we best display this type of information? What is the context? Where and how will this format be seen?

What is the key emotion that will build a relationship with the core audience?

Identify one emotion that people ought to feel most about the brand or group. Establishing the right emotional connection with people creates deep relationships, builds brand communities, and fosters loyalty. Determining how to connect to a targeted audience also means understanding their culture or community. What might connect to an audience in China might not connect to an audience in Ireland.

Who is the core audience?

Identifying the people who comprise the core audience is essential in formulating relevant ideas. Whoever determines the audience and writes the brief evaluates many factors and criteria including the audience's demographic, psychographic, lifestyle, or behavioral profile. The term demographic means selected population characteristics. Some common variables include age, sex/gender, income, education, home ownership, marital status, race, and religion. Psychographic profiles are any type of attitudes relating to personality, attitudes, interests, values, or lifestyles. Behavioral variables refer to things such as brand loyalty or the frequency of a product's use. They can also include activities that these people perform either individually or as a group, such as blogging, dancing, or playing soccer. In digital media and social media, we can effectively narrowcast (target small, relevant audiences) to audiences.

Phase 2: Analysis

In this phase, you are examining, assessing, discovering, and planning. You are not conceptualizing or designing during this phase of the design process.

Design Brief

Is a strategic plan that both the client and design firm or advertising agency agree upon, a written document outlining and strategizing a design or advertising project, the springboard for conceptual development; it is also called a creative brief.

For editorial design:

Is it a new publication or an existing publication? Is it a supplemental publication? What is its function? What is the contesxt? Where, when, and how will this publication be seen and in which media and on which platforms (mobile, tablet [orientation], computer screen)? What is the subject of the editorial content? Who is the author or editor? When will I have access to the content (entire publication, summary, synopsis, proposal)? What are the audiences limitations (vision, language, reading level)?

For a brand or group (nonprofit organization, educational institution, company, human services, any entity that is not a branded product or service), here are additional questions that will help obtain information:

Is the brand or group new established, merging, or being rethought? A start-up? Known or unknown? Regional, national, or global? What makes this brand or group (organization, company, any entity) unique? What are the functional benefits (useful assets) and the emotional benefits (assets based on feelings)? How does the brand or group compare to the competition? Is the brand or group a category or industry leader? In second place? A newcomer? Is the brand or group relevant to its target audience? What is the five-year plan for this brand or group? Ten-year plan?

Testing

Is the opportunity to assess your solutions, get feedback on trial run-throughs, refine, and continue to learn about the people who are your users. Testing is iterative, informing the next iterations of the prototypes. Testing may send you back to find other ideas, reframe the original problem, refine selected solutions, or it may move your prototype along. Testing fosters learning, which leads to building effective ideas. You test it so you can redefine it for improvement.

In the empathy mode, you:

Observe. Watch people and note their behavior in the context of how they do things in their lives and how they interact with their surrounding and others. Engage. Become involved by interviewing and interacting with users (people who consume or employ a good or service) through planned and unexpected (intercept) encounters. Immerse. Experience what your users experience, their challenges, thought processes, and so forth, to best understand them.

The Womens Foundation

Promotes equity and opportunity for women and girls, using philanthropy, research, and policy solutions to make meaningful change.

What specific information and thoughts will assist in this change?

Provide facts and info that will enable people to alter their beliefs and opinions. Make a short list of the relevant info to support your concept. Rank information by importance to further focus the creative development.

Research: To Begin:

Read the design brief Gather information about the brand or entity as well as the product, service, or organization category. Identify and understand the communication goals and objectives. Identify and understand the target audience: the main relevant group who would purchase this brand or utilize this information, service or product; patronize this entity or influence others to do so.

Phase 1: Research

Research the brand, cause, or entity. Your design director or client will brief you about your assignment. You need to know all you can about what you're designing. Become familiar with the design brief and how the design problem fits into the broader brand narrative, which usually is already set. Knowing the audience and the brand helps you find an insight that could jumpstart your ideas.

Step 2: Roughs

Roughs are larger and more refined than thumbnail sketches. Roughs allow you to flesh out a few of your best ideas, to work on each design concept and how it can best be expressed through the creation, selection, and manipulation of type and images in a composition more fully, before going to a final stage. Even though a rough may look final, it is not finished at this point. Roughs should be done to scale (in correct aspect ratio of the final format, whether it is a website, mobile media, outdoor billboard, or business card).

Prototyping serves many related purposes because it:

Tests functionality Is an empirical process; you learn by doing and iterate and reformulate as needed. Allows a better understanding of the user and the design space. Provides a vehicle for discussion with others. Assists ideation, perhaps redirecting or refining, and eliminating ambiguity. Is a way to fail with little cost, yet learn.

Design Thinking

Used to solve communication, information, industrial, and interior design problems; innovate; discover new opportunities; and aid businesses and organizations. Because the spirit of the process often challenges conventional thinking, build ideas, innovate, and develop systems. What set this process apart is its emphasis on prototyping-- a way to learn by doing -- and empathy.

For environmental design

What is its function? What type of space is it? How will the design solution work with the interior design and architecture? Where will it exist? What are the audiences limitations? Will I be collaborating with an interior designer? Architect? What is the context?

For most assignments, the design brief answers standard questions:

What is the nature of the assignment? Is it an individual format or part of a broader project/strategy? What are current graphic design solutions, and how did they fare? What does the assignment entail? What is its role in a broader scheme? Who is the audience? How is the project relevant to its audience? Does a similar solution already exist? What is the media plan? Budget? Deadline? Other parameters?