Why a Strategic Designer Could Be the New Teammate Your Organization Needs
Do you ever struggle with how to present information to your audience in a way that’s visually engaging and professional-looking? Or maybe you’ve worked hard to develop helpful content or research to share with your audience, but aren’t sure of the most effective way to communicate it? You know you need a designer, but how do you tell them what you need? What do you need?
If you don’t feel great about posting or sending the content you’ve created as it is, then yes, you do need a designer! In addition to making things “look good,” design is also communication; it’s visual communication.
You won’t be surprised to know that effective visual communication starts with effective communication. Designing content for visual presentation starts not with aesthetics, but with a strategy built to produce the desired result.
That’s where a strategic designer comes in — it’s what we do!
How a Strategic Designer Can Help
Think of a strategic designer as an in-house outside member of your team who can contribute a complementary skill set that augments your current efforts without adding on to your team’s existing workload.
They’ll dive deep to get to know you, your organization, and your audience really well, as a team member would. Why? Unless they “get” your organization’s mission and vision and who you’re trying to reach, they’ll essentially be guessing at what you need. Why not start with an educated perspective? That’s what a strategic designer aims for.
They are experts at organizing information for effective visual communication, a useful skill set to add to your team. That means you can hand them a substantial collection of information and they will organize it for you for the purpose of sharing it with other human beings. Especially if they really understand your organization and mission (see previous point), they’ll advise on the best ways to organize and present the information to engage your audience.
They’ll collaborate with you and suggest a communication strategy that you can review and respond to. Your involvement assures that the strategy will be on-brand and targeted to your goals.
Their design (how they visually present the strategy) will be built on a carefully considered foundation. Not only will it look great, but it will also be on-brand, visually engaging and easy for your audience to navigate and comprehend.
What makes visual communication effective in engaging your audience? Key Questions to Ask
Consider a few foundational questions I generally ask clients at the beginning of my strategic design process. The answers to these questions help determine what the design needs to accomplish.
1. Who is this for?
Who are you communicating with, or who is your audience? Are they external to your organization, like a funder or a potential client, or are they internal, like your stakeholders or staff? (A worthwhile sidetrack: Seth Godin writes a lot about the value of not only defining your audience, but determining who your “smallest viable audience” is and why this is valuable. See his book, This Is Marketing. Also check out this Forbes article for some nice highlights from the book, too.)
2. What is the purpose of your content for this audience?
In what ways is your content helpful to your audience? If it’s meant to inspire action, what is it? What action do you want your audience to take as a result of consuming your content? What do you want them to do or understand?
3. What is the purpose of your content for your organization?
Are you trying to grow your audience, increase funding for a program, raise brand awareness, or position your organization as a leader in its industry? Or perhaps you’re trying to communicate your organization’s strategic plan and how it will be implemented? What do you want the outcome to be? How will you measure the piece as successful?
4. How is the content currently organized?
Is it organized with your audience in mind? Does the organization of information anticipate the audience’s needs? If it’s instructional, does it follow a logical sequence? If it’s a story, how does it flow? Where might there be opportunities to improve the organization of content and what ways can design accomplish this?
5. How accessible and easy-to-consume is the content currently?
Here, for example, I’m talking about what is or can be made into digestible chunks of information, visuals or illustrations that help get a complicated point across and what is best left as narrative text. This answer can also inspire visual solutions that can help your audience effectively navigate and identify content types as well as strategies to mitigate information fatigue (from trying to parse large quantities of information at once).
6. How and where will your audience encounter the content?
Online? Are they reading it at home or on the train? Are they viewing it from afar? Will they need to hold it in their hands while at a conference?
A strategic designer will evaluate your content to determine how design can help deliver your message to your audience in helpful, organized, accessible and delightful ways. A strategic designer will work with you on how to organize and present the content to optimize its efficacy as a communication tool.
Do You Need a Strategic Designer?
So maybe you know that you need a designer. But how do you know if you need a strategic designer? What is the difference between a strategic designer and a designer?
There are many different types of designers, but not every designer prioritizes strategy. Just because something looks nice doesn't mean it will get the desired job done.
Strategic designers organize and design content for effective visual communication. Functioning as a teammate or helpful collaborator, a strategic designer delivers designs that are not only on-brand and reflective of your mission and goals, but they also recognize the importance of designing for the purpose of achieving specific outcomes — based on your goals.
Good designers take well-organized content and deliver an on-brand design reflective of the strategy you provided. While their role isn’t to provide or improve upon your strategy, they are adept at following what you’ve given and translating it visually. Many good designers work collaboratively with a creative director who guides the design process based on strategies they’ve developed with the client.
Ineffective designs can happen even in the best-intentioned projects. A few factors that can contribute to an ineffective design:
A well-meaning client participates in the details of the design process, attempting to solve design problems for the designer or insisting on aesthetics that diverge from the communication strategy. Overruling design expertise will likely result in an ineffective design. Remember, the goal isn't for you to think it looks cool; this is quite subjective anyway! Strategic design doesn't have anything to do with personal taste or agendas. For example, you may love using bright orange, but the goal of a piece is to clarify a stressful topic and create a calming experience for your audience. In this case, an energetic orange hue may thwart your goals.
Your content needs to be organized in a way that optimizes your audience’s comprehension and engagement and your designer doesn’t specialize in strategy. Your designer may make it look great, but without a solid visual strategy, the design will not be effective in connecting with your audience (at least in the ways you’d hoped it would).
Some projects are a mismatch for some designers. Different designers bring different strengths and levels of experience to any project and not all design projects require the same skills and types of expertise. Knowing a designer’s unique skill set, strengths and specialties is important in choosing the right designer for the right project.
Strategy-Driven Design: Less Work, More Impact
In short, hiring a strategic designer can actually lessen your workload and ensure that the content you’ve worked so hard to produce gets communicated effectively to your audience. Start by bringing a strategic designer into your project at the beginning so they can understand your essential purpose, your audience, and the results you hope to achieve. Then let them deliver a strategy for presenting your content visually and collaborate with them to get the best end results.