How does a brand survive uncharted waters?
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8 Tips Before You Start Your Brand Journey
Are you ready for your brand journey?
Read MoreWays to Make Sure Your Beliefs Don't Overtake Your Brand
Don't let your beliefs overtake your brand!
Read More16 Components of a Killer Brand Strategy
What makes a killer Brand Strategy?
Read More7 Ways to Improve Your Business Storytelling
How do you improve your business storytelling?
Read MoreBuilding A Brand x Nudenotes: Episode 8
Building A Brand x Nudenotes: Episode 8, Building a Client Website From Scratch
What does it take to create a website?
Everything is online now, and a website is an important tool to reach out to your consumers.
Now you don't need to be a computer whizz to create a gorgeous website, the engages with your audience.
In this entry we find out how The Futur Team creates an awesome website. This is the eighth entry in my nudenotes series based on The Futur YouTube series 'Building a Brand'.
Watching Ben Burns , Matthew Encina and the team create a website without coding or developers was amazing, Webflow seems like an amazing tool and the finish looks amazing.
Building A Brand x Nudenotes: Episode 7
Building A Brand x Nudenotes: Episode 7, When Clients Change Their Mind
How do you deal with client feedback?
It is part of every project, sometimes it's positive or constructive, but sometimes it's out of left field, a curve ball that can change a project s direction at the 11th hour.
Client feedback is inevitable, it's how you deal with that feedback that can back the difference between a happy project and a sad one for everyone involved.
Adapt and overcome.
It's the only way - Ben Burns and Matthew Encina have some amazing insights in facilitating the process of dealing with feedback.
What techniques do you have for dealing with unexpected client feedback?
Building A Brand x Nudenotes: Episode 6
Building A Brand x Nudenotes: Episode 6, The Logo Design Process
What is logo design?
How do you make a good one?
A logo’s job is to identify, not explain.
It's one of the most important parts of a business, it's the face of your company.
A good logo must match these criteria: Memorable, Versatile, and Relevant.
In this episode, we saw how The Futur team make the leap from style-scape to design — super interesting to see how the team develop new logo designs.
I’m super jealous of Emanuele Ricci’s lettering skills, imagine what my nudenotes would look like with those skills!
Building A Brand x Nudenotes: Episode 5
Building A Brand x Nudenotes: Episode 5, Presenting Your Ideas To Clients
How do you pitch your ideas to clients?
Last time we looked at developing Stylescapes - this time it's about presenting these to clients. .
Leaping from words to images or a design brief to design concept is tricky but essential to setting the direction of any project.
"Clients don't always know how to express what they are looking for when is comes to visual concepts."
This is where we step in as creative professionals, this is where our value truly shines through.
I love how concise, clear, compelling and god-damm cool Ben Burns and Matthew Encina are presenting to clients... #careergoals .
Top tips for presenting ideas to clients from The Futur:
Give context.
No need to have all the answers.
Have conversations not presentations.
Building A Brand x Nudenotes: Episode 4
Building A Brand x Nudenotes: Episode 4, Developing a Visual Aesthetic
How do define the look of a brand?
How do you translate clients vision for your creative teams?
It's time to curate some Stylescapes!
"This is a crucial step in the branding process as the team turns the insights from the discovery session into a visual direction for the brand."
Stylescapes are moodboards on steroids!
In this episode on The Futur team will use Stylescapes to help Hamilton Family Brewery decide on how their rebrand will look and feel.
The Stylescapes are refined after discussion with HFB to create one final piece to lead the development from now on.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Part 25
Facing Your Fears: Dragon Slaying
In part 25, we learn how to take all the skills we have learned in the past 24 parts, and head out into the world to get shit done.
The key takeaway for me was learning how to change your mindset from right and wrong to what is and isn’t viable.
In creative business, there’s no one right answer to any problem.
The most important thing is that your solution is based on true insights.
Everyone has subjective opinions, but people pay for your objective analysis.
Buy Creative Strategy and the Business of Design here.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Part 24
What Skills You Need to Have to Go from Beginner to Director?
We find out Douglas's two cents on how to further your career:
1. Think about the words behind the pictures.
2. Exhibit the ability to develop sound strategy from research.
3. Development of relevant written conceptual execution created from strategy.
4. Admit when you don't know - ask for help.
Ever since I have read this, I’ve been thinking about how I can level-up my own career.
One day, I would love to be a creative director, and by adopting these four mantras, I know I keep moving closer to that goal.
Now we move on to the final nudenotes spread: let's go slay some dragons!
Buy Creative Strategy and the Business of Design here.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Part 23
How to Survive as a Creative Person, or How to Take a Punch in the Face
Here are seven career tips by Ron Berger, in his contributing chapter in this book.
Hopefully they will help you as they have me.
As Douglas says in this book:
"There will always be someone who works cheaper and knows Photoshop better, so to stay relevant you must become strategic"
As a packaging designer, I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to leverage strategy in my solutions and process, so I can ensure the best possibility of a successful design.
Sometimes it can be a bit tricky, but it is always worth it!
Buy Creative Strategy and the Business of Design here.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Part 22
Hate It When You Get Vague Feedback on Your Work?
It can be exhausting to interpreting the feedback you get on your creative work.
Vague feedback can lead to scope creep, endless revisions, or worst of all, starting the project from scratch.
By keeping your feedback framed in an objective way, you can provide the right solution to the right problem - a problem that your target consumers need to be solved.
The best way to do this is to ensure your solutions link back to the findings of your Creative Strategy Framework, and you will be onto a sure winner!
Buy Creative Strategy and the Business of Design here.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Part 21
Do You Struggle Presenting Your Creative Work?
I don’t know about you, but I genuinely find it interesting to work across both business and creative barriers.
As Douglas says, "gone are the days of creativity for creativity's sake" - and I definitely agree!
Ideas only have true value in business when they have measurable outcomes which provide a solution to a business problem.
As I mentioned earlier, metrics are everything.
You can’t know what success is unless you have a quantifiable metric to measure it.
Presenting creative work too often relies on subjective language, but by folding the language of business into to your presentation, you can re-frame the critique in a presentation from subjective to objective.
This empowers you to better justify your creative decisions.
Solving problems through design is what I love to do, and I realise now that solving the problem is the easy part.
Presenting that solution in a clear and concise way, so that the work does all the convincing - that's the tricky part.
I know that the lessons learned in these nudenotes will help improve my ability to do just that.
Buy Creative Strategy and the Business of Design here.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Part 20
Make a Sale without Selling and Overcome Brand Barriers.
Over the previous 19 spreads, we’ve been through all the various elements of the a creative project.
Now it's time to put it all together and talk about your ideas in the best possible way, to ensure your concept is the one that gets used.
It’s time to talk about pitching and presenting.
Presenting my ideas so they resonate with my peers and clients is something I always think long and hard about.
It’s something I still struggle with today, but, as Douglas says, “practice makes presentable”.
Presenting and pitching is something that I know a lot of us are afraid of, but Douglas breaks it down so it’s manageable and a simple process for us to follow.
Buy Creative Strategy and the Business of Design here.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Part 19
What’s the First Thing You Do When You Get a Creative Brief?
I bet your answer is not to question the target audience in the brief, right?
I hate to tell you this, but you’re wrong.
A deep understanding of the target audience will help your brand to stand out, or differentiate, in the market.
It also allows your teams to better internalise the target audience: the way they talk, walk and think.
Having this deep understanding helps them to deliver better solutions for your target audience.
Also in these nudenotes (top quarter), I’ve added more from Douglas on how to align creative and strategy teams to avoid an ‘us versus them’ mentality.
This is why alignment is so important between these teams.
Don’t work in silos!
As Douglas says: “Focus on slaying dragons, not each other”.
This mindset only distracts your teams from delivering the best possible solution.
Buy Creative Strategy and the Business of Design here.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Part 18
How to Use Empathy and Story to Reach Consumers?
We all love a good story, but few of us see it as a tool for successful branding.
It can be a highly effective tool to take a complex brand system and distill it down into a story full of villains and heroes.
Using storytelling tools helps you align strategy and creative teams enabling them to work together towards that happy ending at the end of those classic stories we all know and love.
These stories can be used to understand the consumer, and to make it easier for the consumer to understand your brand.
Your story should reflect the needs, wants and desires of the your consumer, and how your brand solves their key problem.
Buy Creative Strategy and the Business of Design here.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Part 17
What Should Be Included in a Creative Brief? Part 2
Loved reading about the four fundamental elements of the briefing process:
1. Communicate objectives
2. Brand Essence
3. Consumer Profile
4. Consumer relationship with the brand
How hard can it be, right?
Very.
But it will be worth it...
Constructing a thorough brief takes time, but it provides guiding parameters which focus the creativity toward a set goal.
This is turn reduces the time wasted on dead-end creative exploration.
The end goal of your briefing process should be to create and maintain a synergy between strategy and creativity.
This synergy is the most successful way to true creative genius.
To do this, you must have a good understanding of these four fundamental principles, and be able to communicate them clearly.
Buy Creative Strategy and the Business of Design here.
Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Part 16
What Should Be Included in a Creative Brief? Part 1
Now we’ve established the importance of a brief within a creative project, Douglas explores the elements of a good creative brief.
This spread of nudenotes shows the first eight of eleven questions that every creative brief should answer.
As mentioned in the book:
"The brief is where the specifics of the previous chapters come together. When sitting down to write a brief, you'll need a clearly defined goal or goals, a narrowly defined target, and some insight into what the target wants"
If you want a happy and effective creative team, you need to feed them good concise and compelling briefs.
Buy Creative Strategy and the Business of Design here.