So you think you’re a designer.

You have a clear idea of what you want to see, and as the conversations with the creative team begin, that idea develops. You can see the solution in your mind’s eye, and you do your level best to communicate your vision to the team around you.

Stop.

There is so much wrong with the above paragraph, and in it perhaps one of the greatest causes of weak creative, increased tensions in the team, poor marketing and general unhappiness.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with a client lately, and a conversation around creative briefs prompted me to write this piece. They’d issued a brief to a graphic design tendering site and everything was, in their opinion, coming back way off mark. They were hoping to see more illustration oriented designs, and where that was evident, they felt the illustrations were ‘weak’…I asked to see the brief. It was verbose, meandering, and missing a clear objective. Meanwhile, their criticisms of the designs bore little relation to anything in the brief itself. Instead, they came from comparing what they were seeing, to an increasing well-formed idea of the solution they were after.

The problem with sharing a comprehensive idea of what we have envisioned in our own minds is that it’s nigh on impossible to communicate it exactly as is. However well we do, our communication will be a pale representation of the ‘work of genius’ we believe we’re holding in our minds. Three things are going wrong here.

The first is in the very first sentence. Forget what you want to ‘see’. Remove it from your mind. Think only of what you want to achieve. Hopefully you’re blessed, as I always have been, with exceptional creative talent sitting right there in front of you. Forget about describing your supposed vision of perfection to them, and instead only describe what outcome you’re after. Who exactly are you hoping to influence? What do you want them to feel? Where’s their head at (frame of mind) just before they engage with the creative? How do you want them to act? During? After? What do you hope they’ll be thinking and saying as they engage? And after that?

The second thing at play here is the blurring of roles. The moment you engage with a creative team, you’re working together with distinct roles. You understand the objective. Their job is to deliver a creative solution that achieves it. The more direction you can offer without ever touching the creative solution, the more you can empower them to deliver something exceptional. You are not the designer (even if you can do the creative work, you’ve chosen to grant that role to someone else). Know your place. Commit fully to your role and in so doing, empower them to deliver exceptional creative. It’s harder than it at first sounds, but you have an opportunity to relish on the situation analysis behind the objective, go to town on it and flesh it out to the nth degree. They control the creative response to that, and should have the freedom to do so. Don’t let the two worlds collapse into a shadowy shade of grey, where nobody knows their place and any sense of autonomy and pride is painfully diminished.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, you’ve chosen to work with others. That means you do get to brainstorm together, and with clearly defined roles, one hopes that the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts. Debate the objective. Discuss the possibilities, but remember where the locus of control remains for each. Listen more. Talk less. Inspire. Don’t control. Be humble. When you come to review the work against the brief, can you still hold to your guns and reflect only on whether the brief was clearly understood and well-executed, rather than critiquing the art? If not, how could the brief have been better?

And I’m putting my money where my mouth is here, or my heart on the line — you choose the metaphor. As a consultant, I now have my own personal brand to develop and that requires a graphic identity to breed trust through consistency at every touch point. I know ‘me’, and I know how I want people to perceive me, but I don’t know graphic design. Yes, I can use feathering in photoshop, but that doesn’t make me a designer. I do know how to write a good brief though, and fortunately I know some amazing graphic designers. Now all I have to do is be brave enough to hand over all creative control for my own graphic identity, drop the big ego, and focus purely on trying to understand myself, and what I stand for, and communicate that clearly. Watch this space to see where that trust takes me. It’s worked pretty well in the past.