In the realm of design, the creative process has always been the cornerstone of artistic endeavours. Artists like Damien Hirst and Jenny Holzer would immerse themselves in the process, honing their ideas and refining their craft through iterations.
At Brew Digital, we recognise the power of this creative journey, particularly when it comes to collaborative design projects. Whether we're working on a single artist's vision or a large-scale project, we believe it’s necessary to give the process the proper respect to ensure good results.
This becomes even more important when there are multiple designers working on a brief. Small projects will be assigned one designer to oversee, but for bigger projects (such as designing the TAG stand for Atlassian Team ‘23 in Las Vegas) we’ll involve as many designers as possible in the early stages to canvas a wide range of ideas.
...we’ll often start with a 10 minute activity...a simple creative exercise; conjure something random, draw a character, create something out of what you can see in front of you.
In those design meetings, we’ll often start with a 10 minute activity. It’s just a simple creative exercise; conjure something random, draw a character, or create something out of what you can see in front of you. This loosens everyone up, and gets everybody in the creative mindset.
We’ll then work on ideation, generally trying to give ourselves an hour at most. We treat them similar to decision sprints, but it’s more visual. Bringing different designers together means we get a broader range of work and styles that we can integrate. We love working in this collaborative fashion because, ultimately, design and ‘creative’ are subjective, right? There isn’t a ‘right’ answer, because it depends on who you're presenting to or who you're sharing the work with.
We’ll typically use a Miro board so everyone can see the mood board evolving and either capture visual examples of inspiration, or use the virtual post-it notes to write ideas. This means researching really hard for 10 minutes individually to put up keywords or a visual with a short explanation of context. This means that when it does go to the project designers there's context, texture and meaning.
You may be surprised that we don’t always draw things by hand at the ideation stage. The truth is we don’t want to spend too much time, for example, trying to get the perspective right. There can be a temptation to put excessive detail into making things clear, which is unnecessary when you can just get a photo or type in what you mean. It’s much more efficient!
You may be surprised that we don’t always draw things by hand...we don’t want to spend too much time trying to get the perspective right...you can use a photo...it’s much more efficient!
From there, we’ll collate the ideas into themes and hone them to present to the client. Again, it’s a balancing act between providing a finished idea, and welcoming the customer into the ideation process. And this can sometimes be dictated by the brief – some are looser than others!
During our conversation about design, Brendan and Trudy started talking about Atlassian Teams ‘23 in Las Vegas. We have written about the experience of representing 11 brands cohesively and making our presence a success.
