A Creative Blueprint. Part 4.

Welcome back to Acuity’s bulletproof Creative Process overview. Parts 1 to 3 covered our journey from understanding the brief, planning our response, formulating ideas before we present and absorb feedback. After the green ‘APPROVED’ notification from our online proofing platform, we move into...

7.   PRODUCTION
Everything has been expertly planned, designed and managed to get to this stage. We’ve worked hard together, and our client has now approved production. At this point, many of the hypotheses need to be confirmed, like which tools will work best to deliver what we’ve promised, sledgehammers are not used to crack nuts and nutcrackers are useless at knocking down walls. We’ll see where automation and I’ll whisper it “a i” can be used to help things along. I’m a huge advocate of Paragraph and Character Styles, and we’ll build Libraries of assets for sharing between designers and software (I’m insistent on consistency). Depending on the job, we’ll look at where we can template certain elements and we’ll work in a way that makes future editing easier, for example variable content will sit on its own separate layer above fixed items that are unlikely to change.
Production is always the beneficiary of diligence and smarter thinking in all the previous stages. The understanding and planning we did in Part 1, the ideas and feedback we shared in Parts 2 and 3 determine how straightforward this final section of the Gantt chart is. Sometimes we uncover new challenges, but we’re open and certainly not afraid to revisit the plan and ask more questions if necessary. As you may realise, we have robust best practices which we follow because our aim is always to produce the finest work possible.

8.   LEARNING
When we’ve achieved what we set out to do and delivered our finest work, it’s still not quite 'job done'. We want to continually develop and grow so we evaluate what worked well or not-so-well, check any available data and results, review feedback and do our utmost to learn from any mistakes (and triumphs).
To change things, we need to make change happen, so we look at ourselves. What can we do to improve for the next brief? Is there anything to learn or practice? Is there any training we can do that will help us improve? Did we have enough support? What did we enjoy? There’s a ton of questions we ask and often within an After-Action Review meeting with our client. We take all the answers on board and remember them for next time.
When the housekeeping is finished, the files have been managed and the server’s tidy, then it’s job done.

So that’s it. The eight stages in our Creative Process; our Creative Blueprint to a successful project and happy client.

Did you miss the previous stages? Read them here: Part 1  |  Part 2  |  Part 3

If you'd like to experience first hand how our processes deliver results-driven creative, whether that's a marketing campaign or graphic design, get in touch with us today.

Or if you'd like to see the work our processes have already delivered, check out our case studies.