Studio Missive 17: Documenting my process

Hi friends,

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s been happening at the studio this week.

What’s inspiring you?

1. Flip the light switch on In Common With’s store and watch as the sun sets and the lights turn on. Very clever. (Also looks really cool on the sconces page.) A lot of design cooks in the kitchen on this, apparently. Site credits include Lisa Hedge, Vanessa Saba, Yuji Sakuma, and Ben Wagner. (Via Daring Fireball.)
2. I love Caserne’s work on the new branding for Olive + Gourmando. When I see case studies like this one, where they include a beauty shot of the website, I check to see if the website was built as designed. In this case, it was! Olive + Gourmando’s new website is also fantastic.
3. The Futur has a free course on YouTube called Building a Brand that dives deep into the design process. It follows design studio Blind as they rebrand a brewery from start to finish. There are more than ten episodes. Almost every episode is just over twenty minutes, and they’re structured and plotted out almost like a reality show. It’s quite excellent. The first episode is just over ten minutes long. This is an entire design education crammed into just a couple hours.

What are you working on this week?

I’ve been revisiting my own design process this week. Somehow, I’ve never formally documented it, so when a client asked me for a project roadmap, I just… didn’t have one.

So I needed to fix that. One thing that became obvious after a couple hours of thinking and research (see the Building a Brand series referenced above) is that I don’t have clear deliverables for each phase. My Discovery phase has always left me with a ton of notes, but clients generally don’t get anything from me at the end of it, and that felt like a problem. So I’ve made some adjustments.

Right now, a simplified version of the process for a complete brand identity and website project looks like this:

1. Discovery. Interviews, research, etc. The deliverable at the end is a creative brief for the rest of the project, including the goals, customer personas, and overall strategy. This was the phase I was least clear on before I did this exercise. The goal of the Discovery phase is to extract information from the client and repeat it back to them in a way that crystallizes what we’re going to make.
2. Stylescapes. I like to make these before I design the website or brand identity. The stylescapes effectively get everybody on the same page about the overall aesthetic direction. The deliverable at the end is obviously the stylescapes themselves. 
3. Logo/​brand design. The deliverable is obvious.
4. Website architecture. I’m separating the website design into a couple phases here. Most studios would probably deliver a sitemap at the end of this phase, but I’d prefer to deliver Priority Guides. All the benefits of a sitemap, but way more detail about what is on each page.
5. Website design. Deliverable is the mockups at the end.
6. Website development. Deliverable is the website itself.

If there’s anything you think I’m missing, let me know. This is straightforward and obvious when it’s written down, but it took me a bit of time to identify what was wrong with my process, particularly in the details surrounding Discovery.

Now that I’ve documented this, I think it might also be a useful marketing tool. I’m thinking about making a landing page and a video, or potentially a series of videos (one about each phase). I might even work through an actual project as I go, not unlike the Building a Brand series. I’m also considering turning my Discovery questionnaire into a lead generator. ​“Get a sneak peek at the kind of questions I ask during the Discovery phase in exchange for your email,” or something like that. My goal for this quarter (and next) remains getting better at inbound marketing and sales, and I think this work dovetails together nicely.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Until next time,

Nathan