Design Explorations Archives

When Designers and Developers Collaborate, Everyone Wins

Posted on January 28, 2020November 22, 2024 by Jonathan Haggard

A great developer recognizes and enhances design decisions. A great designer understands the technology they are designing for. Both developers and designers need to have an intimate understanding of each other’s fields in order to produce better experiences for brands.

In order to deliver a bespoke experience for a brand, a collaborative environment needs to be fostered.

How to Actually Collaborate

A key element to facilitating design and developer collaboration is reshaping the reviewing process. The traditional way is to do a bunch of design work upfront, get client approval, polish the entire project, and hand it off to a developer completely “designed.” This often results in quite a few design decisions being compromised because of poor documentation, developer interpretation, or non-feasibility.

The new way of doing things is beyond agile—it’s actual collaboration.

Setting a frequent and casual cadence of check-ins between designer and developer not only speeds up each other’s workflows, but it also allows each party to influence each other’s practice. True collaboration is a developer showing a designer an interaction that is 50% of the way done, so that the designer can fiddle with the code in order to make it perfect. True collaboration is also a designer showing the developer what they are thinking for design early on, so that the developer can raise any flags or offer suggestions to improve the design.

Using contemporary tools is the best way to achieve this type of working relationship. Gone are the days of sharing Sketch files over email and setting calendar events where eight people on the agency side show up to have a formal conversation with a developer.

Today, we use Figma so that the developer can see and modify the designs as they are being worked on. We use Slack to keep in communication on a regular basis and have video/screen share calls when reviewing things that keep updates frequent and easy.

Building Collaboration via Overlapping Skill Sets

To actually collaborate with someone, having overlapping skill sets is key. If each party has an understanding of the other’s expertise, they can make decisions together confidently. This also establishes trust between one another. For example, if a certain interaction is going to be too time-consuming to develop, the developer can offer a suggestion that is rooted in the agency’s design expertise. This is great when needing to come to a consensus on changing a piece of the design to fit the timeline since we can trust that the developer’s suggestion is going to be feasible. It also gives designers a new model of interaction to design against, so we can refine the design accordingly.

Building Collaboration via Remixing

When you have two parties with overlapping skill sets, the other party will often take the idea you have designed and enhance it.

Internally, we used our knowledge of front-end development to deliver custom interactions to our developer Cory, and he would surprise us by making them even better in his implementation. This type of relationship is critical in creating a site that expresses the brand to its fullest potential.

To be technical, our original design intended to use CSS to pin one part of the design while the rest scrolled. The developer went even further and added an overlap to the pinned area once a certain scroll threshold is reached.

This design was enhanced in implementation because the developer split up a Lottie animation and CSS animations that aligned perfectly with the timing. This needed to be implemented this way because the text needed to be editable in the CMS.

Start Today

The best way to build a culture of true collaboration is to start actually collaborating with people today.

Are you working on a document that you are trying to perfect before sending off? Get on a screen share and get input from a developer.

Do you work with a team that has a skill set you don’t have? Start learning their skills, gain empathy for what their jobs are, and bring them into the conversation. Show that you care about their craft and that you’re willing to learn outside of your role in order to make something better than you could have done alone.

Did someone send you a project to execute? Think creatively about it and enhance it beyond what they were expecting. Those little one to two-hour experiments add up over time and really improve the quality of what you’re working on.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

How Creative Design Brings Strategy to Life for Businesses

Posted on October 24, 2016 by Paige Lansing Valle

Embarking on a brand strategy project is an investment. We know it takes dedication, time, resources, planning, and a collaborative, open mindset. And in order to get true value from a strategy project, businesses have to be able to clearly explain the strategy, its meaning, and its value to people across their organization. This is where the power of creative design comes into play.

Powerful Strategy Isn’t Just a Deck

A strategy that simply sits in a presentation deck with a small group of people holds no real value for your business – no matter how smart the strategy is. It needs to come alive. It needs to live in people’s minds and hearts. Everyone across your entire business needs to understand the strategy in order to bring your organization closer to its vision for what’s to come.

Use Creative Design to Bring Strategy to Life

Tying creative design and strategy together is key. And bringing design thinking to how you approach and share your strategy with the people who matter to your business will help get everyone on board and rallied behind it.

Adding a creative design dimension will:

1. Build a solid strategy through an evaluative process:

Creating an impactful strategy requires noticing and deciphering patterns that yield impactful, insightful ideas and present innovative solutions. And creative design is a powerful tool for this.

When businesses bring design thinking into the process early on, strategic insights are more easily made, gaps are more easily filled, and patterns are more easily seen. The strategy evolves faster and becomes stronger throughout the process.

2. Help tell a complicated story:

Developing strategy is not only hard, but the output can be complex. Distilling it into an impactful, digestible, and simple story is important. Creative design is a way of visually and emotionally bringing that strategic story to life.

It helps people see a clear narrative, takes people along on the journey, and even makes the solution seem expected by the end. It’s a way of of simplifying and making the strategy more human and grounded.

3. Make the strategy digestible across your business:

It’s easy for strategy to go over people’s heads. Especially if they haven’t been along on the journey. And organizations often run into road blocks because key audiences can’t grasp what the strategy really means for them.

This is a significant problem. In order for a strategy to truly come to life, all audiences need to be directed in the same direction, singing from the same hymn sheet. Design is one of the most powerful ways of making strategy digestible so that everyone can follow along and do their part.

Once people are aligned and prepared for what’s to come, getting them rallied behind shifts with an understanding of what they mean and where they will take the business becomes a lot easier.

4. Create an emotional impact for stakeholders:

In order to get stakeholders excited about a strategy, you have to make them feel something.

Design is inherently emotive. Visuals and imagery – when approached strategically – can help evoke the emotions needed for key people to get on board.

A stagnant, monochrome, unimaginative presentation of a strategy – no matter how smart or inspired – can’t speak alone. Design helps elevate strategy to the next level – adding emotional value – and boosting meaning and value to key audiences.

Why Design Produces Real Outcomes

Design has the power to bring strategy to life – telling a clear story and adding emotional impact.

At Emotive Brand, we believe that applying design thinking to strategy adds significant value. No matter how inspired, smart, or informed a strategy is, design helps make it truly impactful.

This means bringing designers into the process early, allocating resources, dedicating time, and working together to make more powerful outcomes. Use design to help bring your strategy to life, gain meaning in the hearts and minds of people, and position your business for impact and growth.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design company.

The Design Process: Interview with Emotive Brand Senior Designer

Posted on July 25, 2016 by Tracy Lloyd

The Design Process Matters

At Emotive Brand, we work each day to bring brands to life through strategically informed design. And doing this requires a multi-step process. Wayne Tang, a senior designer in the studio, adds a rare balance of analytics and creativity to the design part of the process. With his background as a mechanical engineer, Wayne brings a logical focus to all projects, a honed systematic approach, and an ability to see the big and small picture to us help deliver the best design solutions for our clients. In this interview, he explains and discusses his design process at Emotive Brand, why it works, and the challenges and rewards embedded in it.

What is the design process? Can you define it in simple terms?

The design process is the set of steps we take, as designers, to reach the final solution. Every studio and designer takes a different approach. It’s another way of explaining our workflow, the ways in which we collaborate, and how we reach the best strategically informed design solution possible.

Why is process so important to design?

There are some designers who just start creating things on the computer right away, and don’t take the time to build or follow a design process. But usually when you do it that way, the solution is not as well thought out and falls short when it comes to execution. A good solution stems from doing your homework. You need to know the client and the industry inside and out. Often times, it takes time for unique ideas to come to you, especially if the industry is complicated. It’s critical that as designers we move through each step of the process carefully and thoughtfully. By doing so we are able to create unique solutions that help differentiate your client and avoid repetition or design that is not distinctive. Process helps promote collaboration between designers maximizing ideas and ultimately creating the most powerful solutions.

Can you outline your design process for us?

1. Research:

First, it’s always important to have an in-depth understanding of the client and their industry before diving in. We analyze the competition as well as best practices outside of the category.

2. Absorb the brief:

The brief is critical for designers, providing the big picture view of what a client needs, and connecting to the strategy our team has created. Understanding the emotional impact of the brand strategy helps me find imagery that evokes those same emotions. I always use the brand promise to help guide the design.

3. Free association:

Not every designer does this, but I find it helpful to draw a word map at this point in the process. It’s almost like a string of word associations that come from the brand. I look for images that match those associations to get a better sense of what direction to take.

4. Mood board:

This is the most important stage of the process for us at EB. It’s a stage of inspiration and creativity as well as focus and distillation. At the studio, we create mood boards for the brand by scouring the net for images. These could be anything from branding projects to graphic design, photography, posters, album covers, packaging, etc. We print, cut, and categorize images and try to create solid concepts from groups of images that reveal something to us about the brand. These boards are always different. Some are very conceptual. Others are more style-driven. From there, we can narrow it down to the most compelling, and powerful concepts. This part of the process is inspiring and exciting. It gives us the momentum we need to move forward.

5. Design explorations:

From the mood boards, we begin to focus in on the concepts. However, we make sure not to limit the possibilities. Often times, new concepts emerge in this stage. Sometimes initial concepts get grouped together. Or one concept gets broken apart. This part of the process is all about creating quick designs. For instance, we would create a quick sketch of a logo, explore how the system could look with a few layouts, and then move onto the next concept. It’s not about details. It’s about coming up with as many rough directions as possible.

6. Refine, expand, refine, refine, refine:

Out of the many concepts we’ve created, we collaborate to select three or four that we agree hold the most potential. These are the concepts we refine again and again until the solution is where we want them both aesthetically and strategically. We would then expand on these concepts to see how the system could flex in different media, and then refine again and again and again.

What are the challenges you have come across in this process?

Sometimes, I hit a block. And this is hard, but creative blocks are inevitable to any creative process. However, what usually helps me is simply talking to my fellow designers. I just ask what other designers think, and we always find a way around a particular problem. Getting other perspectives really helps move through blocks in the process. Sometimes I take a walk. Or I do menial tasks and turn my brain off design for a while. I really have had a few new ideas pop up in a shower – it’s not a myth!

Another challenge, as always, is allocating time correctly. This is why understanding the client and their industry is so important, as well as designing from a strategically informed mindset. This understanding makes it easier to identify what parts of the process are going to require more time and attention and be of more value to the client and the end solution.

Can you talk more about how working with the EB team plays into the process?

Having a team to talk through differences, gather inspiration from, and flesh out ideas with is key to moving the process forward. As you get to know the people you work with, you learn their strengths and weaknesses. Everyone has them. In our team, some designers are more logical, while others are more intuitive. You need both to create truly unique, well thought-out solutions. Every designer brings something different to the table, and another set of eyes can make all the difference.

What are some of the most important attributes to the design process today?

I would say adaptability and flexibility. Some projects are less conceptual. Others are more client-orientated. The ability to be able to tailor the process to the project is very important. And processes that allow adaptability and flexibility often lead to more creative, innovative, and powerful ideas and design solutions.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

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Tag: Design Explorations