Most of the times, design agencies are fire-fighting. Be it big or small, every creative agency worth its salt, knows what it means to push creativity on one side and the lack of it on the other side. The benign nature of people in general and the lack of understanding of the design as well as the creative process surely hampers people’s understanding of dealing with the team of design agency. In the end, the agency’s team does receive flak for the problems and stays frustrated longer.
When creativity camps on one side, it becomes all the more necessary to put the whole perspective of design into the gambit. At BRIM, with our experience of many years puts us into the advantage of coming out of the whole scenario and looking at it objectively.
Design agencies or design-related startups have a lot of elements to look into why problems related to design crop up from time to time. However, discounting the people variables, there are certain aspects that actually reduce the output drastically.
THE VARIOUS VARIABLES THAT WE HAVE IDENTIFIED:
Free Loading:
This usually happens for newly emerging startups but even the established agencies are not free from the “want it free” thinking.
“I just need a small logo. Can you do it for free?” Creative design and thought processes aren’t free. Each logo has a purpose and rooted brand philosophy laid within it. It’s called Visual Identity. It takes up time and resources. No it can never be free.
Problem occurs when new design agencies take up such work thinking that it could lead to client retention. A ‘prospective’ client who dictates free things will never pay. Never!
Fast track:
“Can you send the design tomorrow?”. The brief was just taken today evening and the expectation is to get it the next day. How can you put in content and design together into an advertisement and get it out within 24 hours? The stories of meeting deadlines, caffeine junkies and burning midnight oil kinds give people totally wrong notions of the right kind of design creation. Additionally, when new startups try to actually follow these client expectations to retain them initially, they experience a great burnout problems and shutting shop syndrome.
Failure to research:
One of the prime issues with design problems are failure to research. Doing your homework is extremely important. Every department or person in the team needs to draw up on their client background, competition, prevailing market trends and future impact of the design needs to be taken into radar. However, given the time crunch or lack of understanding leads to no research. Sometimes, the design team thinks they are confident and well assured of their work without researching. It is this highly misplaced confidence that could make things go wrong.
Funding:
Money fuels growth. Though that’s the truth, design agencies need to roll in money through great account acquisition and work. Funding brings with it many aspects that can add problems for the company to work smoothly. Funding pitches and investor meetups take up a large chunk of attention and preparation that can pull down the growth stage. The creativity takes a serious backlash due to this tedious process. The better solution (unless funding is the last resort) would be to create great brand presence through the work you do.
The following way is a simple step to tackle your design problem:
Every problem at a particular stage is unique and solutions to them are unique too. Don’t repeat those solutions, work on them uniquely.
