Ella Rychlewski

Our guiding light here at Gong Creative is to adopt a collaborative approach. We get to know our clients, understanding their commercial needs, and forming as clear a picture as possible as to what they are looking for. This takes time and we realise it’s up to us to be transparent about our creative process.

Our common starting point is to open a dialogue with our clients to capture a thorough brief. We then take some thinking time – sketching out concepts, testing palettes, surveying the competitor landscape. The next step is to collect the design components and to format them. These might be anything from written content to icons, from visual guidelines to photography.

Once the vision is clear and the necessary elements have been collected, the design itself can start. So important is the initial briefing and development phase that it can actually be more involved than the time it takes to complete the first design draft. These early development stages ensure that the final product is cohesive and in tune with the client’s brand story and message.

The last stage, after the prep and execution, is the review period. We work very closely with clients and will share design drafts early on to ensure that we capture their ideas. This demands an extensive and thorough review period with several rounds of changes and revisions. Then the signed off work can be packaged as required.

All in all the actual physical ‘design time’ of a project can represent less than a third of our input. Skipping or skating over the first thinking and final review steps, particularly the foundational prep stage, often leads to an overall increase in the time spent with revisions or a final product neither us nor the client are 100% happy with. That’s a false economy.