Time to Get “Creative”!

It’s something that every designer has heard at one stage or another: “You’re the designer, do something creative”. This statement causes designers to quake in our boots because, as designers, it is our job to take your concept or idea and bring it to life in whatever medium you require: poster, flyer, brochure … whatever! When a client says to us “do something creative” this roughly translates to “look I’ve got no idea what I want, see what you can come up with”.

Why does this make us nervous? Well it’s because we’re not advertising creatives. We’re not sitting down with you for a couple of hours working up what you’re trying to achieve with your campaign. We’re  not going away for another couple of hours to work up some concepts and ideas to meet your campaign objectives before running our ideas past you to see which one you like enough to pursue to the design stage.

So when you say to us “do something creative”, what you’re actually asking is “before you do any design work, can you please ascertain what we’re trying to achieve with this piece of marketing collateral and then come up with some concepts for me”. And we’re totally up for this - but performing these “creative” tasks effectively doubles the time we need to spend on the job, which of course doubles the invoiced cost to you.

Since we realise that no one likes getting unpleasant surprises in their invoices Swish Design operates on the concept that communication is everything. If we ever find ourselves in the position where you’ve asked us to be your advertising creative as well as your graphic designer, we promise to let you know before we start on the job