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One of the things we’ve been looking forward to about this process of working in the open is opening up the behind the scenes aspects of what we do. Typically when you see work from an agency, you see the starting point, and where they landed, but not much in between. Essentially for most projects all that’s available is the sanitised, prospect-friendly case study version. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s nice to be able to openly and honestly share some of what goes on in between.

You’ll have to bear with me a bit in these posts. Writing is fairly new to me (I put my first post out in December), and I’m already feeling like my default tendency is to stick to the safe ground of “this is what we did”, and “here’s how you do that”.

I have a feeling this process will be much more interesting if it’s also about sharing the messy in-between bits of our projects. It definitely feels more me to be in sharing mode than teaching mode.

Over the next few posts I share here, I’m going to pick out a few aspects of the thinking and decision making behind the design work that took me from the brief to the final concept, and talk about how I navigated those. I’m also going to share some of the “in-between” moments that worked on the project, and some that didn’t.

First up, one of the biggest joys of this course brand development project was the way Mat and Scott embraced what we’re doing and gave such lovely feedback. It’s not just about the nice words, but about the way they both gave so much space for us to design with freedom, without any sense of trying to steer the process too much. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m so pleased with how these designs are coming together.

The importance of going all-inpermalink

I was recently feeling in a creative rut with a particular project. I was sat with a mentor of mine who reminded me that all that I was making a classic mistake. I was trying to fit too many ideas into the concept.

I’ve always tried to find a central idea that can thread throughout a design, and honing in on that thread is central to my process. But I was too close to the project to see that I’d allowed several good ideas to creep into the design, at the expense of one great idea. Essentially, I was reminded of the importance of going “all in” with a design concept.

I like Saul Bass’s take on this idea: “Design is thinking made visual”. It’s why I love working with writers and brand strategists. Great strategy and messaging makes finding a design concept a lot easier and by proxy a lot more fun.

All of this was fresh in my mind at the beginning of this project. For me, there are three key tactics I tend to lean on when coming up with a design concept:

1. Speak to the client
2. Read the thing
3. Go find some inspiration and reference material

The best ideas are hidden in between the wordspermalink

I’ve already spoken about getting a gut feel for a project’s visual direction by speaking to the client and gathering reference material, but I’d say above and beyond any other aspect of the work — reading the thing you’re designing — is probably the most important thing I would advise anyone getting started in design to do before opening up any kind of design tool or browsing Pinterest.

It sounds obvious, but given the extent to which so much of the internet looks the same, perhaps it’s worth stating the obvious. For me, the best work I’ve done has always come from reading and reflecting, then going out in search of inspiration. The best ideas are always hidden in between the words, in my experience.

Take Mat’s course, for example. Originally we had “Learn to write JavaScript deeply” as our hero headline. I liked this, and it got me thinking about a few visual metaphors we could use to support the statement. But after reading the page a few times, one of our secondary headlines really stood out.

Senior level JavaScript developers have a skillset that goes well beyond syntax expertise. I’m here to help you get there.

This felt like it captured the essence of why Mat’s course was different — so many courses focus on syntax and learning various methods and properties, whereas Mat’s focus is to go beyond that, and develop an understanding of how JavaScript thinks.

With that in mind, I played with moving the copy around a bit and re-worded that statement to “Take your skillset way beyond syntax expertise” and gave it a try as the hero headline, with “Learn to write JavaScript deeply” as a supporting heading below the hero.

This new headline opened up some much more interesting creative avenues. The idea of taking your skillset way beyond was much more in alignment with the ideas we had to explore retro futuristic aesthetic, and gave me a focus for reference imagery to hunt for, like graphics relating to motion, sci-fi user interfaces, and futuristic horizons. It gave me an idea that I could go all-in with, and the end result was so much better for it.