CHAT BACK: Creativity vs Process

How many times have you heard the comment about a new brand logo: "Anyone could have done that!"

Maybe so, but what that "anyone" can’t do is manage the highly complex process of brand design and redesign within large national and global businesses.

What many companies these days pay for is not design but the efficient management of the process of design over the actual delivery of a truly creative iconic brand.

Balancing the two is a rare skill and one all businesses should actively seek when engaging a creative services agency.

Great branding and design agencies are not just paid to come up with brands that focus and embody the company’s values, emotion and promise to the customer.

They deliver real and lasting value through their ability to successfully navigate the complex and sometimes hostile landscape of business needs, market constraints, egos, expectations and aspirations of stakeholders inside and outside an organisation.

Getting a large, diverse group of people with competing agendas to agree on a new methodology for their brand communications means we must be coach, psychiatrist, diplomat and showman in one. This is what good design agencies are paid for.

Many brands need complex systems that allow for sub-brands across a range of media and environments. This requires discipline, organisation and a sophisticated process.

This why many agencies employ strategists and account directors to control and manage the process and keep the designers separate and at a distance.  

Yet this can also be a short cut to mediocrity and “anyone could have done that”.

No one more than the designer is better placed to uphold standards and resist efforts to dilute and dumb down the integrity of the original brief and grand vision.

Process and strategy are a key to good design. A brand that can’t be practically implemented or doesn’t positively improve the business and its bottom line is useless.

But process will never substitute for genuine creative thought and insight.

Many creative service agencies have become slaves to process. Ideas are reduced to mechanical outcomes with little difference to the previous.

Real creativity is a culture, not a process and needs to be protected jealously.

Strategy exists to protect creative integrity, not limit or reduce it.

When engaging with your branding and design agency, clients need to ask “what is your design culture?” rather than “what is your design process?”

Creative agencies exist to deliver effective creative. This should take primary place in terms of decision-making and partnerships.

Yet many clients choose process over creativity. A process driven project is guaranteed to give you the “anyone could have done that” result. A disciplined, relevant and creative approach will give you the magic “I wish we’d done that” result.