1. Thou shalt not believe design doesn’t matter
We are all exposed to world class design everyday. That Mercedes in the wing mirror, the Coke can on the shelf, the road sign saying don’t go above 30, the layout of the yellow pages. Great design is all around us.
People don’t shut this experience off when they look at the output from your company. You are judged by the same standards. If you think that design doesn’t matter, your customers will judge you harshly.
2. Thou shalt not mistake flashy design for good or effective design
Got a glossy, flashy, striking, sexy brochure? Great! If you are selling spare parts for a range of tractors through a catalogue, a functional, chunky and reliable image might do better. Probably more important still is good indexing and cross-referencing and lots of dull diagrams showing exactly what part fits where. Good design has to be led by what the object or piece of communication needs to do.
Websites in particular often fall into the trap of looking great but being utterly hopeless at delivering what users actually want.
3. Thou shalt not try to say everything all at once
It costs a lot to communicate to large numbers of people. Airtime is expensive, printing costs are high, direct mail distribution costs even higher. The temptation is to cram every message together all at once. This is a false economy. If you throw a single tennis ball to someone there is a fair chance they will catch it. Try throwing five tennis balls at someone simultaneously.
Your target is likely not to catch anything and they’ll probably be pretty annoyed with you as well. Communicating with people through visual images is the same as throwing tennis balls at them.
4. Thou shalt understand thy customer
Understanding what people want – what they really, really want – is at the heart of good marketing. What is the ‘truth’ about your offering? Your design work needs to express this. For example, the brochure for BMW’s Enduro touring motorcycle has very little about the bike in its 48 pages. It is full of pictures of amazing wide open spaces, spectacular scenery with empty open roads stretching off to a vanishing point at the base of a mountain range. BMW understands that it is not selling motorcycles, but the promise of freedom and adventure to their wealthy, frustrated, middle-aged, middle manager, rat-runner customers. And it exploits this.
5. Thou shalt give a written brief
Dealing with creative agencies is a bit of an art. However, there are some simple rules you can follow that might help ease the relationship.
Firstly a written brief is essential, albeit actually quite rare! Unilever recently had to instruct its truly enormous marketing department that briefs to ad agencies had to be written down. It had found that many were not, and that written briefs invariably gave better end results.
The reason? Well two things: first is that people quite often don’t hear what you think you said. In such a subjective area as design misunderstandings about expectations and direction are easy. Second writing it down is a good discipline, helping you the client define exactly what you want. The written word punishes vagueness in thinking, exposes poorly thought out strategies and gives agency partners something specific to work on.
6. Thou shalt not hurry the process
All good things come to those that wait. Not a particularly fashionable sentiment in the on-demand, just-in-time, instant gratification Internet age, but when it comes to design and advertising excellence, the longer you give an agency the better the work is likely to be.
If you want it to tomorrow, don’t expect the Millau bridge. Plan ahead a bit. Haven’t time to do that? Ask the agency to plan for you – demand a time schedule laying out the whole process from preparing the brief (eg. research if you need to understand your customers a bit better) to delivery of the finished product.
7. Thou shalt not bark if thou hast hired a dog
A common mistake that is very hard to avoid, is to have too fixed idea of what you want back when you submit the brief. It is very very hard not to try and second-guess the agency’s output. Unless you are a multitasking genius you’ll end up with second best, derivative ‘me-too’ work that lacks originality and impact.
The best clients keep an open mind when stuff comes back. Try and judge work on the basis of the broad goals that you wish the design to achieve, and to put aside the preconceptions you have. Then you’ll get the best out of the people working for you.
