How Did You Design That?

The event marketing client from my previous blog post was CoreNet Global, a professional association for corporate real estate executives.

To create the materials for their Annual Summit Meeting, we went through a thorough process that began with several client meetings. Through the meetings and research I got very familiar with CoreNet’s unique challenges in marketing the summit.

I always immerse myself in a client’s business to fully understand their situation before brainstorming goals and defining approaches to achieving those goals. (There’s a lot more involved in the strategic planning stage and I’ll have to save those details for a future post.)

Once we have goals and our plan in place, I like to do my own research. I encourage the rest of the team to help brainstorm marketing messaging, which also helps me develop visual communications to present in the form of prototypes. I think faster with pencil and paper, and it’s not uncommon for me to rough out about 80 concepts for one event promotion campaign. This helps generate as many creative ideas as possible, without being too critical in the beginning.

Next I narrow my 80 concepts down to about 12 of the strongest concepts. I’ll tighten those 12 up, still working in pencil, and then whittle down to the three or four concepts that best address our marketing goals. The focus on our goals helps me avoid personal bias in my selection process.

Ultimately, I’ll tightly mockup three or four concepts on the computer to present to the client for discussion.

We discuss the options and decide which solution works best with our marketing objective. I’ll make any adjustments and begin designing the rest of the marketing materials based on the approved strategy. Once the event is over, we discuss any challenges that came up during the event promotion, measure results and discuss opportunities for the future.

In a nutshell, this is typically “how I designed that.”

Can you get me a draft tomorrow?

At a business luncheon recently, I presented a case study on event marketing materials I designed. I was pleasantly surprised to see my client was in the audience. During the Q&A at the end of my presentation, she shared an insight for the audience when she said, “Good designers make it look easy, which leads to one of the biggest misconceptions people have about graphic design. It’s actually very difficult.”

I never realized until I heard her comments what it must look like to clients when I present materials. They just see the finished visuals, but a lot of strategizing, design and production time goes into making them.

But it’s like that in any trade. From the outside, we usually assume it can’t take that long to build or create something. I know I’ve been guilty of this in restaurants when I’m hungry!