Design at the Speed of Digital

The web changes quickly and clients expect us to keep up. In this always on age, clients often want design projects turned around within a few days, if not hours.

The traditional agency is used to having a lot longer to do its work. Print deadlines are set many weeks in advance and work is signed off on a weekly basis, not hourly. But when you’re talking about small graphics projects for digital properties, or even iterative web design, those timelines may no longer work for your clients.

But how can you continue to produce excellent design work while working within these newly compressed timelines? Sometimes you just have to wait for inspiration to strike, and sometimes that doesn’t happen overnight (or over the next hour – whatever the case may be).

First, be honest with your clients about your workflow. Especially if you are single-person shop, like I am now, you need to let them know not only that it takes time to produce design work at the quality that they hired you for, but also that you have other commitments, and, at least in my case, you can’t rush the process or you’ll get flawed work that makes no one happy. No one, NO ONE is less happy with flawed work than I am. Not even the client who is paying for it.

Second, you need to re-evaluate your processes and see where efficiencies can be found. Some clients don’t need three mood boards, let alone six. The curse of digital can also be the benefit. You can check in with clients more often which means you don’t have to do unnecessary steps to hone in on a design.