The Creative Process

The creative process, simply put, is the set of steps used to manage a project, outline goals, and generate ideas. A well-defined creative process makes project management simpler, clarifies objectives for everyone involved (including your clients), and, if used properly, tangibly increases your productivity and client relations.

I can think of more than a few Account Executives and Strategic Directors who will roll their eyes at this post, dismissing the ideas here as an unnecessary distraction between signing one client and cold-calling the next, which is, of course, an embarrassing reaction, considering the business they're in.

BUT, knowing is half the battle, right? So let’s not waste time pointing fingers and assigning blame. Let’s dive right in.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS WILL

Keep everyone on the same page
A well-thought-out creative process not only breaks down complex projects but also educates the uninformed along the way. This gives you an opportunity to show your clients what you’re doing for them and why, and to invite their approval at appropriate stages throughout the project, aligning visions and preventing later backtracking. Let’s face it; an educated client is a happier, more satisfied client.

Clearly track and record all your work
Recording your work (e.g., research, mood boards, drafts, and sketches) helps explain your rate and what the client is paying for. If used effectively, these records can serve as a selling point in new business pitches.

Keep your team and clients accountable for decisions
Nothing is worse than when something goes wrong or someone makes a mistake. It’s impossible to guarantee an error-free work environment or project. But when a mistake is made, you would be crazy not to want to know what happened and where in the process it occurred, so you can prevent similar mishaps in the future. A good creative process is built around a step-by-step approach that requires sign-off from someone on the team (or from the client, depending on the circumstances) for each step. These controls add an extra level of accountability. If a project moves to the next step without the proper approvals, any team member can tell simply by looking at which sign-offs were or were not made.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS WILL NOT

Make you more creative
It will, however, force you to ask the right questions along the way, which can only lead to a better product. People unfamiliar with the creative process think it's a magic bullet, but that expectation is unrealistic. Just remember, the creative process will help you generate ideas, but it doesn’t guarantee that all of those ideas will be award-winning.

Manage itself
Leadership is essential for the creative process to work. This means that overall responsibility for a project is assigned to senior employees, allowing new hires or less experienced employees to learn proper procedures through a well-structured training program. Competent leadership will go a long way toward building a team that works well together.

Solve all your problems
This is the most common excuse employees give for not using the creative process. All creative endeavors need direction to be effective (read: profitable) for your company. This process is not a magic cure-all. It has to be implemented and managed like anything else.

One size will not fit all
Another common mistake is thinking that the creative process is a rigid set of rules. We have to understand that every company and every project can vary greatly. Creating a process with broad enough steps to allow for interpretation is a must. This is why leadership is so important. Someone with a good understanding of how a project starts and ends inside the company is needed to manage every project. Having someone who clearly understands how each step affects the next is essential.

Lock your company into one way of doing things
The best creative processes are flexible and allow for interpretation. They allow changes to be made on the fly, depending on the project’s scope and demands. Good processes make every project more manageable and easier for a creative team to navigate. Again, it’s all about leadership, understanding, and executing as a team.

THE PROCESS ITSELF

The following is a step-by-step breakdown of the “generic” creative process. Remember, this is just an outline. Your creative process can be more or less detailed depending on the types of projects or clients you work with. It’s also worth noting that I consider this a more modern version of the creative process, as it combines the steps of the traditional “idea generation” process with important administrative and project management elements better suited to the modern design environment.

Step 1. Administration & Acceptance
This is an easy one. No one should work without a contract or clearly defined expectations for the project’s scope. Outlining who is responsible for what and within what time frame is a must. This is the time to handle all legal matters. It’s also the best time to outline how you and the client will work together, how often you will communicate, and at what intervals decisions and milestones will be signed off and discussed. It’s also a mental thing. What a designer is really doing at this stage is accepting that the client’s problems are now their problems. In other words, it's hard to solve a problem unless you have mentally (and in this case, contractually) accepted that there is one.

Step 2. Research & Defining the Problem
It goes without saying that you need information before you can solve any creative problem. The amount of research you will need to do and the time it will take to gather it will depend on the size, scope, and budget of the project. However, this is a crucial step and should not be skipped.

Step 3. Ideation
One of the things that has stuck with me since my school years is something a professor once told me: “It’s not the designer’s job to come up with the right solution, but rather to eliminate all the wrong ones.” That always made a lot of sense to me. And you can’t really do that without a fair amount of time and a great deal of exploration. One of the biggest mistakes designers make is thinking they know the answer to a problem without any exploration. It’s been my experience that your first 50-100 ideas are going to be terrible, and they’re going to be the same 50-100 bad ideas your competitors have. Push yourself, be honest, and keep sketching and exploring until you get that rush of adrenaline that tells you you're on the right track.

Step 4. Judgment
If there is one step that is usually missed, it’s this one. All too often in the modern age of “we needed this done yesterday,” designers try to impress the client by doing things quickly. Don’t get me wrong. I understand that things need to get done in a timely manner, but never underestimate the power of educating the client on how doing things right can be. If done right, this can be another selling point and something that can make you or your company stand out from the competition. The judgment phase should be used to step back and review all the goals and requirements outlined in steps one and two. You have to be honest with yourself and be willing to step back if the project demands it.

Step 5. Execution
If you have completed the first four steps correctly, this step is easy. You simply build exactly what you proposed to the client as a solution to the problem you defined in steps one and two. The solution should be backed by your research from step two, proven by your exploration in step three, and defended by your examination in step four. And now you’re simply executing work that has been defined, researched, explored, conceptualized, and questioned. All the while, the client has been educated, informed, and kept in the loop, and has made key decisions with you or your team at the right pre-scheduled moments.

Step 6. Feedback
The final step of any successful creative process is defining and understanding what success means. Eventually, the project you and/or your team just finished will be released into the world. You need to know how to measure that success and document it. If, in the worst-case scenario, success is not achieved, how will you adapt to help solve the problem? Remember that design should be a solution to a problem, not a catalyst for more of them.

CONCLUSION

In closing, I developed this version of the creative process because I believe in design as a universal way of solving problems. Although there are many ways to enter and succeed in this business, we all deal, at some level, with the “currency” of creativity. At its core, creativity is the art of generating ideas. If you truly believe that, you have to ask yourself, "What are clients really paying for?" I tell new clients at the beginning of the process that I’m giving them the final design for free. What they’re paying for is the time, research, experience, and process I applied to the problem to solve it. That’s what makes design valuable, not whether it’s “good” or “bad.” Those terms are too subjective to be useful to us as designers. What we need to do is find appropriate solutions to problems. That takes time and a well-thought-out, proven process. So if you’re not selling process, what exactly are you selling?