The creative process

Project Details

People form a first impression of a business in 50 milliseconds.

Putting your best foot forward to customers, investors, and stakeholders is crucial.

Project Goals:

• Create a visual representation of the newly updated Mission, Vision, and Guiding Principles that encompasses the ROCK Networks brand

• Create a design that is easily reformatted to work on different mediums – website, PowerPoint slides, postcards, etc.

• Develop a custom definition of ‘communities’ that describes how it is used at ROCK Networks

Creative Process

In general, my process for designing follows 5 steps:

1. Gather all available information and determine project goals/requirements

2. Conduct research, look for inspiration, and brainstorm ideas/layouts/colours/etc.

3. Design drafts

4. Get feedback

5. Address concerns and incorporate feedback and repeat steps 4 and 5 until client is satisfied and all goals are met

Background Information

There are a few things to consider before beginning the project:

1. The design needs to adhere to the brand guidelines, which I had previously updated to modernize the brand look

2. The look and feel has to remain consistent with previous content pieces - has to have a clean and modern look

3. ROCK Networks being a telecommunications/tech company, the design has to convey a professional image

Design

Having already gathered information on the scope and goals of the project, I needed to follow the rest of the steps for the two main components of this project: 1) defining “communities“ and 2) designing the visuals.

Defining “Communities”

There were two components in the process to come up with a custom definition:

• Conducting independent research and brainstorming ideas for what “communities“ means at ROCK Networks

• Getting together with the marketing team to brainstorm the options we came up with and improve the drafts with each others’ input

Designing the Visuals

Website users read, on average, only 28% of the words on a page.

To say that images and visual aids are essential is an understatement. My idea for the design was simple – images to represent each section + a simple and visually appealing layout for the brand statements.

Finding the right images:

• Each image was chosen to capture the message we are trying to communicate in each section

  • Mission: this is what we’re doing every day – creating connections with people individually

  • Vision: this is the overarching, high-level goal and how we see the future of the company – creating connections globally

  • Guiding Principles: the guidelines that guide our work every day as we work together to achieve our mission

  • Community: we are defining what we see as a digital community – here we have a larger group of people connecting with each other (while also connected through their devices)

• Considerations:

  • Need to show diversity in the images chosen

  • All images all need to be high-quality because it needs to work on all different mediums

  • Images need to be clean and modern to fit the brand

  • Need to use photographs and not digital illustrations to remain consistent with other content pieces

Designing the perfect layout:

At this stage, I experimented with different layouts and styles to see which worked the best.

First Drafts

Layout & Composition

• The communities definition is separated from the main graphic since it is a separate point/idea

  • Though after the initial feedback, it was determined that it should be a part of the main content (while still showing that it was different)

• Repetition – blue all caps headings are used to be consistent with other design pieces

• All drafts use layouts that can be quickly adjusted to fit any medium

Typography

• Headers are written in all caps to highlight the different sections while the body copy uses sentence case

• The exception is the ‘community’ section which uses lower case type to match the design of a definition in the dictionary - we are providing a definition and want to subtly communicate that without having to explicitly write out “communities definition”

Colours

• I chose images that are clean and simple and use blue/cold colours

  • I changed the colour of the mission image, changing the red shirt to blue to match the theme

• I used blue to highlight the different sections of the graphic (blue headings) as well as to highlight important words within each description so they stand out

• I only used the primary colour in our palette (along with black for the body copy) since it’s a relatively simple design - adding too many colours would have made the graphic too busy