Wildfire Productions’ Creative Process.
March 3, 2018Creativity is often a journey – Here’s your compass!
We at wildfire hope you enjoy the journey and love the ride. Creating advertising is an exciting journey. It has it’s moments but you are hopefully creating something new and that has the opportunity to be the next big idea. Wildfire aims to help you understand the design process. It’s paramount in creating great advertising. This is our professional method and we are here to try and simply this process.
Today we’d like to explain the “pre-production”, “production” and “finished art” process through to “implementation” and “publishing” of each creative outcome.
Before we start we’d like to add there are no real short-cuts. Maybe quick keys and better products to ease the load but no real creative short cuts. Things take time to develop and find the strength to build brands and capture markets.
These days with computers we find way too often that clients and people try to cut corners or cheapen their design budgets. They often create unrealistic deadlines and use ill planned assets or content. Content is King and it will always dictate the outcome.
So having a respect for the design process is very important.
Cutting corners, will always produce human error. It’s where mistakes get made, quality is sacrificed or it can leave you wide open for competitors to create something better or even look better than you. Wildfire has more than two decades of production experience and is confident in its methods.
In the client to advertising agency relationship, when you are creating content or coming up with creative ideas, stakeholders will always be indecisive when you are breaking new ground. Most clients are risk adverse, they only back safe things, but at the same time demand “wow factor” or hold the opinion that the competitors have the edge. Reactionary advertising is never good when building brands or following trends. Clients should try to be the trend not “bend to trends”. At Wildfire we like to think we can build confident branding solutions, so clients can rest assured our strategic advice and creative designs work well not just for the moment, but well into the future.
To do this we base all our creative thinking in well structured creative process, which builds an organic “melting pot of creative ideas” that allows clients to have a wide range of options. This library of ideas enables clients to be reactive in their strategies, a measured branding approach and well thought out even if something sudden arises. You have to be prepared and process and planning is the key to any successful brand.
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“Every design starts with a great brief!”
Wildfire works best with good briefs and clients that are prepared to partner with us to get an “elegant solution” or a “knock out” result. Design is really determined by the client’s content so identifying the elements needed to communicate your message is important. The design process allows for all the stakeholders to think clearly every step of the way to decide the right way for the communication. There is always so much at play to consider so the communication process has a few stages before progressing to a final design. This process also allows design teams to function quickly and effectively to a clients needs and sets the ground rules on an ever changing environment like advertising design.
The process is pretty simple. You are always just dealing with a few simple ingredients. Either “Audio” and “Visuals” or “Images/Graphics” and “Copy”, so a design will only be great if the content is great and the client and design team work through this stepped process.
Step 1: Pre-Production
This is the stage where the brief turns into a range of ideas designs or mock ups. These are rough and ready to be pulled apart. They should never be taken to literary or become over laboured. They are a Brainstorm and experimental to say the least. But in this crucible of fire great ideas have the opportunity to bubble to the surface and often even though many ideas get discarded it starts to create a library of brand thinking that can be employed later or spur on different approaches later or down the track.
Step 2: Production
This is where the best of the best preproduction gets worked up into layouts and the concept is explored for a second time with more care taken to typography, design, style templates and the purchased or produced photography gets photo retouched and placed in for real. This is where the mock ups become the real polished advert.
Step 3: Alterations and Amendments
Every production has to be proofed, (by both the client and design team) altered and often amended to get the final design polished and ready for publishing. Here designers look for the design things like turnovers, hyphenations, kerning, leading and balance. Rounding off invisible boxes and making things line up or not line up. We also proof for spelling, tense, punctuation and double check things that the client might forget, but mainly the visual craftsmanship is our gig. The Clients job is to direct where the copy is good and all is approved by the board of directors the marketing team or the staff involved. This amendment and alterations stage can have a few rounds but ultimately 2-5 maximum is the best result. Anymore you are really running into poor B2B communications. Although with that being said some clients just can’t decide throughout the whole process. It happens don’t sweat it.
Step 4: Finished Art.
This is the last step before implementation or publishing. This is the designers “preflight” test. We check the colour spectrums of RGB or CMYK, we go through the assets and content and make sure they are press ready for the printer. The size is right on brief, the bleeds are to spec and with it “impose” correctly. For newspapers are the “ink levels set at the right %” or is the file POSTSCRIPT ready for the local printer’s digital RIP or an overseas printer’s offset RIP. There is a lot of technical stuff designers do and after 25 years we at Wildfire have post product check lists and work hard to prepare the art for publishing and implementation whether through our preferred third party printers or the clients it’s a process that can’t be underestimated enough.
Step 5: Implementation + Publishing.
This is where the third parties come in. Printers, publishers, online media, uploading to television stations and more. Sometimes the marketing department internally within an organisation or our client handles this process and sometimes Wildfire work the creative end-to-end with it’s suppliers and experienced operators. Regardless of who in the design and creative partnership between the client and Wildfire this is the final step. You are only as good as your last ad! So this is where all the steps lead to – Job done and the ‘Fat lady sings’.
The Bigger Picture.
This process above describes a pretty basic “job-to-job process”, but to get the clients branding right and the big picture planned, Wildfire also likes to sketch out and map the clients; goals, strategies and get a long term perspective.
At Wildfire we professionally recommend our clients having a “Brand Essence and Positioning” meeting first. If you have already mapped this out with another agency or have a “Branding Guide” to follow we really need to have this upfront. Clients with these guide lines or branding rules often become indecisive or too many department minds start effective and changing the brand over time. It’s only human nature to want to change things when you see another company doing well and decide that the company they work for should also do the same.
It seems like a good idea but often it’s just copying others and developing branding and giving time to grow and develop is really important. If clients don’t have these essential brand guides, developing; “styleguides”, “Branding and Design Guidelines” and working through our “Brand Essence and Positioning workshops” will ensure you have a strategic advantage and solid brand presence over time. Couple this with regular “Brainstorming” and “Creative development time” (in other words a good “pre-production” process) from time to time and not working Job-for-Job will really push the envelope of your communication and grow your market position.
If clients and teams are getting bogged down in one-off projects, then this truly stalls the creative flow and becomes a very costly process. Energetic creative explorations will ensure you get a proper process going and tell your brand story with confidence.
If you need to know more about our game changing processes, check out our downloads page. Here you’ll find our business outline and process sheets. They are a great start in understanding how we work and developing your budgets and estimating our costs. If you want to know more please read more of Wildfire’s Blog or go to FAQ to understand more. As much as our clients have great expectations of our creativity, Wildfire also has a professional expectation of its client. We right these blogs to foster a better more understanding B2B working relationship that lasts well into our working future.
We are passionate about your business and we hope you have found this blog useful and insightful.
