Design Project Planning | Step by Step Process

Hey everybody, happy Friday. It's good to have you all with me today. Um, we're going to be talking about some really cool stuff today and uh it's going to be very helpful to anyone who's been a creative professional for any length of time. Definitely uh people early in their careers, but also mid to late career folks. I think everyone's going to learn something today. So, if you could, if you're watching, if you could pop into chat, say, "Hey," and let me know if the sound is working all right, if the video that would be really great. All right, so welcome. It's going to be great talking to you today about design project planning. And if you happen to be watching on LinkedIn, I just want to let you know that I can't see your chat on LinkedIn. So, if you want to engage in the comments or see the majority of the chat, pop over to YouTube. The link is actually in the first comment on LinkedIn. Uh, so you can jump over to YouTube if you want or you can watch on LinkedIn. Totally fine. But I just want to let you know that I can't see your chat there or engage with you that way. All right. So, uh, thank you, uh, Peter for putting that in the in the, uh, comments. But if you do happen to have a question as I go through the content today, I wanted to, uh, let you know that if you type question in all caps before your question, as I circle back at the end of the presentation, I will definitely, uh, answer your question. I just generally don't pause during the presentation to take questions. And if you haven't uh in uh connected with me on social media, you definitely should. I'm Philip Van Dusen just about everywhere. If you go to philipvandusen. com/muse, you can get on my email list and receive my newsletter and any other communication about uh videos, uh podcasts, um courses, anything that I'm offering. And my newsletter is actually pretty good. It's been coming out for about nine years now. And um I share about marketing and branding and design and creative careers and share content and videos and podcasts that I think are noteworthy. So you might really enjoy uh that newsletter. Julie, good to see you. Peter, good to see you, too. Um I'm glad you joined me today. All right, so one other thing, and that is that if you haven't been checking out my podcast, you definitely should. And just recently, what I've been doing, I've been going live really regularly, like every week for the last six or eight weeks. And um I'm taking the audio from these podcasts and I'm actually repurposing it, sorry, the audio from these live streams and repurposing it as podcast. So if you've missed any of the live streams that I've done or you want to listen to some of the content that I've been doing on the go, they're on my podcast. So you definitely should check that out. All right. So, if you guys are game, I'm going to jump right into it. There's a lot of content today, and I'm actually going to move moving pretty quickly. Um, but it's dense, it's very tactical, and it's super important for anyone who's a creative professional. And if you happen to be an entrepreneur and are engaging an agency or a freelancer to do branding projects for you, this is also going to be helpful because it will really help you kind of get your thoughts around how a design project or creative project should be organized and what some of the things are that you should be paying attention to and um and help you evaluate the process that you're going to be going through. Hey Dan, good to see you. Sheila, welcome. All right, I think we should just jump right into it. All right, so what we're going to be talking about is developing and planning a design project. So design project planning step by step. And the headline for today is that you got to plan the work. It's very easy when you're a creative to kind of want to jump in and do the design and get going, get paid your deposit and you know, jump off the diving board. But putting some rigor and some planning and some process into establishing the project roadmap is time super well spent. And so you want to plan the work and then work your plan. This is where we're going to be going today. We're going to be walking through kind of six key stages in what it takes to design a project plan. And uh so stage number one is engagement and preparation. That's where you kind we

start off and we have our discovery calls etc. Number two is project architecture or actually when you're developing the project plan. Number three is kickoff and brand foundation. Number four is the creative brief. Number five is the actual creative development. And number six is the final delivery and even more importantly followup. That can lead to more work. And I'm going to share more about that when we get to that point. You have to um you have to understand how to plan the project, but you also have to know how to participate in it. And that is just as almost an important and equal part of the process. And I'm going to be talking today about what you need, what you need to plan for, build into your proposals and into your project plans, and also what you don't need. So to keep it simple, but to keep it refined and tight and concise so everyone can move through the process with minimal chaos and minimal headaches, right? So that's what we want as creatives, right? We want minimal headaches, minimal scope creep. We want the fewest rounds of revisions and creative reviews that we can. And that's what we're going to be talking about today to try to keep things really tight and concise and running like a welloiled machine. So who is today for? Today's for creative professionals of course agency side, small agency, big agency, freelancers, consultants, but also the client side. So the companies, the entrepreneurs, the people who want work done, creative work done for their company, both of these audiences can benefit from what I'm going to present to you today because it takes two sides, right? It takes two sides of the street to make a really successful design project and to understand each of our roles as we go through that project. And the reason why is because if a project fails, it will be because of what happened before design even started. In my experience, if you do great scoping, great proposals, good strategy, good design strategy, then all of the rest of it, all of that design goes very, very smoothly. You have to create some structure and some guard rails around this process. And doing design project planning up front is going to make that the results of that the possibilities of that happening um a much greater percentage much higher percentage of chances of it actually being painless, lessa chaotic, and more fun to do. Let's talk a little bit about just for a second around why projects have a tendency to fail and let me know whether you guys identify with this at all. If you've ever had a project fail because of one of these things. One of the reasons is the lack of strategic planning or having any kind of brand strategy for the company that you're working with. It could be unclear scope or what happens a lot of times is scope creep. So you start off with one kind of a scope for the project but it morphs and it changes and more stakeholders get involved and suddenly the scope is creeping into something else. Another reason projects fail are unclear objectives or an incomplete or unclear project plan. There could be no guard rails for how you're going to be evaluating the creative that's in the project. There could be misalignment amongst the stakeholders on the client side on the agency side and also one of the most important things is the success criteria. How do you judge the work and that the project has been a success? Right? Those are just a few of the reasons why projects have a tendency to fail. So let's jump into the stages of design project planning. Okay, stage number one is engagement and preparation. And this is you'll see a bit of a larger phase because there's a lot of moving parts of it. And the thing I want you to keep in mind about this is that if you scope a project wrong, everything that follows is going to be damage control. And I know that's kind of hyperbolic, but it's true. If you plan a project really well, it can run like a super welloiled machine and you're going to have less chaos and less heartache all the way around on both sides of the table. And so the first phase of this is the discovery call, qualifying the client and upsell. And so the activities that are involved

in this are qualifying the prospect. So, are they, you know, are they able or capable of paying the sorts of fees or the rates that you charge? Is the scope appropriate for what you do? Um, the project goals, the methods, and also, is there a client agency fit? Some of this is vibe, right? You have to pay attention to whether this feels good or not. And so you want to make sure not only is a project right for you, the fees are aligned, but also that you think that you're going to be able to work well with a client. If you get red flags at the beginning, it's always good to walk away. If you're able to do that and you're not too desperate, walking away can always be a really good thing if it doesn't feel like a good fit. And an added bonus to this discovery call and qualification um kind of phase is the ability to upsell to sell in more than the client originally may have come to you for. And I'm going to talk about that just a little bit. So the discovery call includes a number of things. This is just a little bit of the detail. What you want to do in a discovery call is you want to gather and understand as much information about the company that you can. You want to gather background information on the company. What are their products? What are their services? Who's their customer avatar? Do they have any brand strategy? Has any kind of marketing strategy been done? Do they have they ever had it done? And if they haven't, that can be a huge opportunity for you if that's something that you're able to um develop and engage in for them. Also, the other thing is if they don't have that, any understanding of their brand, their marketing strategy, that can be a bit of a red flag if you're jumping into a creative project because that should really be the underpinning for everything that you do. What is their brand ecosystem? So, what's the current state of their brand ecosystem? Do they have a brand guidelines? Do they have marketing assets? Do they have a business plan? What do they have in terms of business and brand assets that you're going to be able to draw from and are going to help educate you at the beginning of the process? Excuse me. Do what's their understanding of the competition? This is a really important one and one of the biggest opportunities for you. I am always shocked by small to medium-sized businesses in how little they truly understand their competition and where they sit in the competitive landscape. A lot of companies think that they're out there by themselves or they may have an understanding of their one competitor who's biting at their heels or the one competitor that they're chasing, but it's a much larger landscape than that. And if the company doesn't really have an understanding of who their competitive landscape is, that's very important for you because that's a great opportunity for you to sell in a competitive audit or some sort of insights around the marketplace. And it's also again a bit of a red flag if they don't really understand their competition. that's going to make it harder for you because you're going to have to do some research into that before you kind of launch into your creative aspect of your project. There are the project goals. They're going to come to you with some understanding of what it is that they want, right? This is what we want. But as you go through this process of discovery and ask all these questions and really dig into their business and start to understand what they know, what they don't know, what they have, what they don't have, you may actually discover that what they say they want, they need is not what they actually need. They may say, "Look, we want a new website. " And when you dig into it, you might find that they need a better funnel driving people to that website. Or maybe they need a better customer journey on the website they have. There's all sorts of things that would, you know, a client may think that they need one particular thing and once you dive in and do some diagnostics, it might turn out that they need something slightly different or even better yet something more, which again would could give you some opportunities to do to sell in additional things. The last thing in a discovery call that you should really go into is your capabilities. And the reason why I suggest that people leave it to the end is because if you're digging into getting some background on the company and understanding what it is that they want and you're getting a better understanding of what it is that they need when it comes to your dis discussing and presenting and pitching your capabilities, you can tailor that message to exactly what it is that they want or what their expectations are. So you can to a certain extent frame your capability set around what it is that they need so you sound like and look like the perfect

answer for them. So that's kind of some of the pieces that go into a discovery call. The next stage that we get into is what I like to call the ballpark quote. Instead of going right from the discovery call to developing a fully f-fledged proposal, which sometimes can take, you know, hours and hours of time to develop a proposal. I always find it best to come to some alignment around a general understanding of fees before you do that. You can either do that in the discovery call itself or you can kind of go offline, think about it and send them an email with a level of suggested scope and ballpark fees around that scope and then get alignment to that ballpark quote either through email or you could present them those ideas on a subse subsequent call. But you want to get a highlevel agreement, a gentleman's handshake agreement to their um to their understanding what your fees are and their accepting of those fees. The reason why you do that is because it takes a tremendous amount of time to develop a proposal and you want to get some alignment before you actually spend the time to do that. You don't want to waste your time or theirs if there is a drastic misalignment in understanding of fees that are going to be involved in the project. And then after the project quote is accepted, that's where you start to narrow down and tighten up the actual scope of the project and move into the project proposal. The project proposal includes things like a highle project plan, objectives of the project, some activities of the project, deliverables, fees, timing, and the contract. I'll get into a little bit more specific detail with that. So there's kind of eight main parts more if you consider all the different phases that are involved. But number one is the you know agency introduction. So an introduction of your credentials. It might be a small kind of beauty show of some of your creative work and an introduction of your team. Number two would be a uh intro letter or some sort of a note at the beginning of the proposal that's you know kind of laying out um and presenting the proposal to them. Number three is the objectives of the project. So what are they looking to accomplish through this project? And then the big piece of a proposal are the phases of work. Generally I break out phases into individual page for each phase. If there's a discovery page, stakeholder interviews, um get competitive audit, design, brand guidelines, you know, whatever there all those different levels of deliverables that you're going to have for your client. I break those into separate pages or phases. Inside each of those phases, you're going to describe the phase and its objective, the activities involved in that phase, the reviews, how many presentations there are, the expected number of revisions, what the actual deliverable is, what is the thing they get out of that phase, as well as fees per phase and an estimated timeline or a time duration for each phase as well. And then towards the end of the proposal, you get into the project calendar. You have a fees page where you break out the fees by phase and then also have a total um for those fees. Generally, I have a signature line on that page as well. And then finally, you move into your terms and conditions contract, which should be in your proposal as well. And they should also have a subject uh signature line on that as well. Number eight is next steps. So after they got the signature pages on the proposal and the contract, you want to have a page at the end that kind of tells them what's next. You can either do that in the email that you send the proposal with, or you can actually put it in the proposal itself. Now, some people like to present proposals on Zoom or in real life rather than just sending it out to the client because it gives you an opportunity to really answer questions and get into it and establish start to establish that level of intimacy and relationship with the client. But that's really comes down to it being up to you. And then you want to make sure in every single project that you do, you have a terms and conditions contract. That can be just if it's a small project, it can be as little as a paragraph, but you want to lay out what the terms of the agreement are. Kill fees, you know, deposit amounts, balance amounts, when things are paid. There's a whole range of things, and I've done videos about terms and conditions, contracts. It's that is a live stream in and of itself. So, I'm not

going to go down that rabbit hole, but you want to make sure you have terms and conditions in your um project proposal. Stage number two is project architecture or the actual project plan. So, after the contract is signed, what's next? The next step is you want to create a design project plan. Now, the thing to understand about project plans is that project plans and mostly project calendars are always living documents. I don't know I've ever been involved in a project where the calendar didn't change a little bit somewhere. And very often the project plan itself can change or phases can be dropped or it all of that should be stipulated in the proposal. But you kind of have to be ready for the fact that sometimes stuff changes, particularly calendars. Best laid plans of mice and men in um in a design project is to kind of think the calendar is going to go exactly the way it was mapped out in the beginning. So there are kind of six key parts to a project plan. What is a project plan? A project plan is basically a holding document. It can be for you. you can and just used internally or you can actually share it with the client and kind of co-create it to make sure that all of the stuff is kind of captured in the same place. But for our intents and purposes, I'm going to be talking about it in terms of what are the six kind of key parts of a project plan to be used internally. The first part is the what. So that is what's the scope of work, what are the phases, what are the deliverables. Now, yes, some of this is included in the proposal, but there are aspects of this when you pull all of this together that are not actually in the proposal. So, having a project plan can be very helpful because it's kind of aggregating all of that information and it's kind of a holding document for the whole project. And then number two is the when. So that's the timeline, the calendar, the milestones, what I like to call the decision matrix. I use the, you know, the acronym or the methodology that's RACI or RECI, which is who's responsible, who's accountable, who's consulted, and who's informed of a decision. If a project is with a larger company with a lot of stakeholders, it's very important to understand who's including it in what meeting, who has the decision-making rights, who's just there, you know, to be informed by it. Um, establishing and kind of u capturing that, codifying that is a really smart idea to do in a project plan and those critical milestones and how the phases are going to work and overlap with each other. One of the tools I'd like to use with project plans for design are Gant charts. And if you're not familiar with what a Gant chart is, it's essentially a project plan calendar, but it shows us phases of work, um, reviews, timeline around what you're doing, what the client's doing, when the presentations are, and because often phases don't butt up against each other, just one stops and one begins. Often they overlap each other. And Gant charts are a great tool to kind of make that very visual for us so it's easier to follow. Uh Google Docs has a lot of great Gant chart templates so you don't have to do it from scratch. There's ways that you can um create GAN charts and there's also a whole lot of apps that make them too. Uh the third part is the who. So who are the team members both on the client side and the agency side. Who's the agency team? Who's the client team? Who are any additional stakeholders? You want to capture that in the project plan. Number four is how. How are things going to get done? What are the communication pathways? So, who communicates with who when and what's the cadence of that? What are the work plans? What are the phases of work? What are the platforms you're going to be utilizing to do that work? All of that how information is captured in the project plan. The fifth part of the project plan, oops, sorry. plan is foundation. Foundation is where you collect all the brand assets. It could be marketing data, user research, if they have any competitive research, uh resources, any understanding any contributor, outside contributor, interdependencies, maybe they have outside agencies that you have to interface with. Understanding the entire brand foundation is an aspect of what goes into the project plan. And then number six is infrastructure. Capturing infrastructure and how things are going to get done and on what

platforms the kind of technical and tactical aspects of that is another thing that's important to capture in a project plan. So what are the applications that are going to be used? Is there any kind of project management software that's going to be used? uh project management software like Monday or ClickUp or Pipe Drive. There's any number of project management um applications that can be used just internally or actually shared with the client to process work and do approvals and comments and all that sort of stuff. You have to decide on file sharing. You might want to establish a CRM. And so that kind of infrastructure is a good aspect to kind of capture in a project plan as well. Stage number three is the project kickoff and the brown brand foundation. So stage three, project kickoff in the brand foundation. The project kickoff is a kickoff call with the client and this is when the project starts up. So you want to review that project plan if you are indeed going to share it with the client or you just reconfirm and rego over the proposal and understand the phases of the work and the calendar etc. This is essentially a call or a meeting that's meant to onboard all the stakeholders to the fact that the project is starting what their roles are going to be and how it's going to progress. You want to talk about that decision-making matrix, the racy, so who's responsible, who's accountable, who's consulted, who's informed through the decision-making process. You want to talk about how communication is going to go. Some clients love phone calls, some like email, some like uh, you know, project management software. What is that communication going to look like? Uh, what is the um approval chain going to be? So you want to understand when you're presenting work in a creative project, are all the stakeholders or the final decision makers in that meeting or are they going to then have to shop it through their organization and get higher levels of approvals? Understanding that chain and identifying that in a kickoff meeting can be really helpful just so everyone is on board with exactly what's going to be happening. That's one of the places where design projects, creative projects can go really well, go really wrong. And then finally, you just want to kind of review the calendar and go over that and make sure that that's, you know, everyone's on board with what the plan of the calendar is because it may shift. Um, and if it does, you want to be Johnny on the spot with that and communicate with the client so that doesn't come bouncing back at you. That's a whole another thing. All right. And then the project starts. And when the project starts, the first thing that you want to do is get into the brand foundation. So that's gathering from the client any kind of brand documentation. So do they have style guides? Do they have marketing plans? Do they have business campaigns that other agencies did? that information that you're going to need to know to kind of uh to make sure that you are completely um uh informed about their entire brand landscape. So all the creative work that you do aligns with that. Uh this phase also the brand foundation and research also um is where stakeholder interviews might happen. So you might be interviewing um the stakeholders within the client organization or you could possibly even be doing customer interviews to understand the customer experience that they have. This is also where if they have any competitive audit information or understanding of the competitive landscape that they would provide that to you or you would be doing that at this stage of the game. you would be starting to do a competitive audit for them to help inform the work. And then consumer insights research. Research is one of those things that actually can happen in a number of different stages of any creative project depending on the scale of the company. Research can happen before a project even starts to inform the work. It can happen in the middle of the project to evaluate the work. It can happen at the end of the project to evaluate the work or the you know whether it's going to work in the marketplace depending on the scale of the client that you're working with and depending on budgets etc and what is known or not known um research can happen anywhere any number of places in a design project so I can't get too specific around that but understanding the research that they may have or if they want to do any research around the project this is where that come becomes a very important part of the conversation. And then this is also where brand strategy is done. And so if the company

has brand strategy information, you want to make sure that they provide that to you. If they don't, that's a huge opportunity for you because having brand strategy done for a company can drive and make simple, more targeted, and more effective and more successful any kind of creative project that gets done for a company. If you have experience produ developing brand strategy, that's great. If you can get contracted to develop brand strategy for your client, that's even better. And if you are a creative professional and you've never done brand strategy or you don't have a clear understanding of it, I actually have a course called Brand Strategy 101, which is a foundational signature course that can really get you up to speed on brand strategy very quickly and show you exactly how to integrate that into the sort of business that you have. So, if you're interested in learning more about brand strategy, you go to phipvandusen. com/bs101 and you can read about my brand strategy course and enroll in it from that page. The thing you have to think about brand strategy like I a cattle shoot and I actually talk about this in brand strategy 101 a little bit but brand strategy and design strategy the reason why it exists is in order to take the subjectivity out of the creative evaluation process. it. You want it and you need it in order to develop the creative in a really targeted way. So, it's extremely effective and is going to do the job that it's meant to do. If you understand the customer avatar and the brand itself and the competitive landscape, having brand strategy in place before you start off any kind of a creative project is going to make that creative project easier for you and more effective for the client. And it's going to make the entire process a lot smoother because as I said, it takes the subject subjectivity of evaluating the creative work. It takes the subjectivity out and makes it much more objective because you're making decisions based on strategy and what needs to be accomplished by the work and it takes it out of the purely aesthetic uh kind of sphere of like what I like, what I don't like. If you don't have strategy, creative strategy, brand strategy, presenting creative is literally just a beauty pageant. And it comes down to what the client likes and you can't have any say in that. But if there is something that's more objective about it and less subjective by inst, you know, kind of instituting strategy, design strategy into the process, you win. So, highly recommend um either learning brand strategy or making sure that you present your creative work in a very strategic way. Now, I want to talk about the creative brief. Um the creative brief is the designer's best friend. So, I'm going to back out for a second. Stage four is the creative brief. The creative brief is a designer's best friend. You have to think of it like a second contract. Now, creative briefs are fantastic. They are essentially an abbreviated encapsulated overview of the project as it's going to inform design or creative. And it's where business strategy and creative strategy intersect to inform design or creative. And it literally will define what success for the project looks like. It anchors every single creative presentation in design strategy and again removes that subjectivity of what the client likes or doesn't like and moves it into a world of objectivity whether it's onbrand on strategy or not. It makes design critiques and design decisions so much easier and falls into that realm of like you got to move the client down the cattle shoot. So they end up coming out the other end at the design that's best for the business and also the design that you want them to choose because that's the one that you think is going to be appropriate for their brand. Now, who creates a um who creates the creative brief? The creative brief is usually created with larger enterprise companies. by the client company and it's provided to the agency. And there's, you know, if you've ever worked in the agency world, there's an agency trope around the idea of the bad creative brief. We all know and have received bad creative briefs from the client. And generally when that happens, the agency goes back and they kind of rewrite the brief or go and interview the client and get all the answers to

the questions that they need and the creative brief gets revised and kind of co-created until the agency is happy with it and then that creative brief is used to judge and drive the creative project. Now, creative briefs are a step in this sort of project that unless you're working with a larger enterprise client or you're in a larger agency, a lot of times the creative brief step is skipped. But if you're a smaller freelancer, individual contributor, and you've never worked with a creative brief, it's a good idea to kind of start to get your head around it because it can be a very handy tool even if you only use it internally to help guide you in the process. I've also known people who actually develop a creative brief and share it with the client and use it as kind of a springboard to every presentation that they do because it helps ground the conversation and strategy and takes it again out of that beauty pageant sort of um kind of vibe. And so what's in a creative brief? Again, there's a number of things that are in the proposal and in the project plan that are captured in the creative brief, but the idea is that the brief simplifies it and um translates it into a way that creatives can understand and creatives can act upon. And so the project description is in there. The brand, what it is, the brand, product, service that's actually being affected by the project, what's the mission of that brand, what are the goals, what are the business objectives for the project, what must that design or piece of creative actually achieve? What are the sort of context? What's the context of the project or what are the insights involved in the project? That could be who's the consumer target? What's the competitive landscape look like? What are the kind of market category insights? What do they want to achieve with the project? Also included in the creative brief is a design or brand design toolkit. And that's any kind of visual brand equities that already exist that have to be taken in consideration in the project. For instance, if you're designing a website and the brand has a brand logo and a color palette and you know guidelines, you as a web designer or UX designer have to take all of those brand standards under consideration when you produce work for them. If you were doing a packaging project and they have a line of projects or packaging that has a certain kind of architecture to them, you might need to follow that architecture to an extent to do this line extension or to do this other project. There may be existing brand resources or equities that have to be maintained or considered for your project. So that's another thing you want to kind of capture in the creative brief. and then design strategy. And I'm going to be talking about this in just a second. But often times, if you have time or if you can get paid for it, developing stylescapes, mood boards, creative anchors, theme boards as a precursor to actually doing design exploration can be very, very helpful in focusing that design um exploration. So it's very tight and it's less easy to go off track. And so if those sorts of mood boards or stylescapes are developed, sometimes they are retrofitted back into the creative brief. So the creative brief um has all the information that I just listed, but then once those mood boards, brands scapes, etc. are developed, they are injected back into the creative brief. And I'll explain why in just a second. Also in the brief are um any kind of uh requirements. So that's any deliverables or mandatories, if there's communication hierarchy that has to be established or followed, if there's any kind of really clear success criteria that the um that the client has already laid out that should be captured in the creative brief. any kind of logistics that's timing dates key milestones um and any kind of research needs if there's any of those would also should be captured to a certain extent in the creative brief and then uh I generally try to list like the names and titles and contacts of the key decision makers on a project and the levels of review or approval. Now, that sounds like a whole tremendous amount of stuff, right? And it can be. That's the thing. And that's why this whole bad brief thing has become such a trope in the agency business because when large companies or enterprise level companies put together a brief, sometimes they can be 15, 20 pages long and if you give

that to a design group, they don't know what to do with it, right? It just like they have no concept about how they could drive or how that should drive the creative work. So, when I was in the agency world, I developed a one-page creative brief that actually has kind of holding places for all of this information. And the reason why I developed that was so I had a very simple tool that carried all of the information that was pertinent to the creative project, but it was on a single page that I could give to my design team and say, "This is what we follow. " And so, it was simplifying the information in a very visual way. And um and so I developed this tool and I actually offer this tool as a downloadable product on my website. It's called the one-page creative brief and it's 20 bucks and uh if you go to philip vandusen. com/proucts you can download the PDF right there. It's got instructions on how to use it. This one-page creative brief is also um featured very um significantly in the brand strategy 101 class and is part of that class. So, I decided to actually break it out and sell it as an independent product because it's an amazing tool and it's helped a whole lot of people and um so check that out if you're curious about um the onepage creative brief. Stage number five is when we get into creative. So, this is the fun part, right? This is what we're in this profession for. The thing to remember about creative is that creative success is generally guaranteed when you have guard rails and the clear guard rails I'm talking about here are is design strategy and brand strategy. Those create that cataloot that help act as guard rails to drive towards the most appropriate decision for the project and takes the subjectivity out of decision making and makes it more of an objective decision-making process. And so I like to start off every meeting with a review of the creative brief with the client. So it constantly reinforces the idea of what the design and brand strategy underpinnings of the project are. So, and I the reason why I always review it just very quickly before every creative presentation is just so everyone is aligned and then when we start talking about creative we talk about it in terms of strategic through a strategic lens. the first part of the creative process if you have time for it, if there's budget for it, and if you find it helpful in your creative process. And that's to create some level of design strategy. That's taking the business strategy, the brand strategy, the project objectives, and translating that into some sort of a visual design product. Sometimes they're called stylescapes. Sometimes they're called brandscapes or theme boards or mood boards or creative anchors. They're essentially that initial stab at establishing a design language that's going to inform the creative development process. And when those sorts of things are developed, they make they simplify the design um exploration because it's creating a sharper point to where that creative exploration has to start and it kind of cuts off all of the red pairings that can um can cause scope creep. Once those sorts of stylescapes and things are developed, putting them back into the uh the creative brief can really be helpful. So, when you're jumping off and reviewing creative, you're going through the brand strategy, the creative strategy, the marketing strategy, and you're looking at those um initial design strategy boards. And then when you review all the creative in that meeting, it's all going through that lens. So doing design strategy, some sort of visual around that can be really helpful. Lots of clients don't want to pay for it. But the one thing I would say is that even as an exercise, doing it yourself and injecting it into your creative process can be very helpful in ensuring the success of the process and that success of the project. And then we get into design. So that's doing the design, the creative work, all the presentations, the reviews, the refinements, the feedback, etc. Finally culminating in the final design. And then as I mentioned earlier, research could happen. So sometimes user research, consumer research happens after the final design is arrived at to doublech checkck whether it's going to be successful in the market. I've done a lot of work with PNG and PNG when they

do major projects for Breeze or Tide or any of the brands that I worked on with them. When you do a piece for them, them going to market with a design like that is a hundred of millions of dollars investment. So they usually do user research to make sure that it's going to be accepted in the market before it actually is produced. So sometimes post design process research can be done. And then finally stage six is final delivery and followup. And you have to remember that delivery isn't the end. It's where a lot of your leverage actually begins. So it's been a successful project, everybody's happy, and now it's time to deliver. But you can also get a whole lot of traction out of this part of the process. Let me explain why. So you deliver the artwork, you're delivering the production art, maybe the working files, maybe not in terms of giving them the working files, but you're delivering that final work in a digital or physical form. And then there's finalization, the icing on the cake. So they do the final balance of payment. Maybe there's a post-mortem meeting with the client to kind of review the success or how the project went. And then there's follow-up. And the follow-up is kind of a very important piece. This is after the project's over. Three, six months down the line, you might want to circle back with that client and ask them about the success of the project, whether there were any kind of key performance indicators, any kind of market metrics that were met, any lifts in business, any more visitors to the website, any more form fills, whatever the indicator is of a success of the sort of creative project that you did, you want to always take the time to circle back to the client and hear from them how it went. A, that shows them that you're really interested. B, if it was successful, you're capturing information that's quantifiable and super helpful in case studies. You can also gather testimonials. So, you can get some testimonials you can use on your website. You might be able at that point to get some consumer feedback. So, some feedback they might have received from their consumers about the creative work that you did. You can also ask your clients for referrals. Are there any other companies or any other stakeholders in your company or divisions in your company that could use this sort of work that we did for you? Are there any kind of network connections that you have who you could possibly introduce us to? Going back to the client and looking and asking for referrals. You can't get unless you ask. So going back and asking for referrals is one of those things can be that we can forget because we're moving on to the next project. But if you've had a successful project, you want to make sure that you're creating that leverage for yourself to get more work and to continue to be successful by asking for what you need, which is referrals to other companies. And then you want to gather whatever information that you can um from the brand for your portfolio. So you can develop a case study and you can, you know, publish that case study and that can become a vehicle for getting more clients for you. And so this is what we covered today. We covered the six stages of design project planning. Engagement and prepar preparation in number one engagement and preparation. Number two project architecture project planning. Number three kickoff and brand foundation. Four is the creative brief. Five is creative development. And six is final delivery and follow-up. And I said at the beginning that I was going to share something special at the end and I want to share this with you. And that is that I um I've developed a mastermind community. It's called Bonfire. And if you're looking to improve your business, improve your meaningful network, people that you know that you could use as strategic partners in projects to add rocket fuel to your learning, Bonfire and mastermind groups is an amazing vehicle to do that. And if you go to philipvandusen. com/bonfire, you can learn more about what a mastermind group is. I the few videos on that page of myself explaining it and also videos of people who are in Bonfire or have been in Bonfire um and the value that they got out of it. So you might want to go and check that out. Bonfire is a hybrid kind of coaching group coaching and mastermind community for mid to late career creative professionals. And it includes uh four

Zoom meetings a month. Two of them are mastermind sessions. All of this is on Zoom. One is an office hour session and one is either a visiting expert or an inspiration session. You get group coaching from me. All of the sessions are recorded and are available in a gated online community for you to review later if you miss a meeting or if you um you know want to catch up or re-review or listen to relisten to something that you might have um heard before but wanted to kind of reement in your brain. Uh there's an amazing resource library over a hundred downloads, templates, tools, playlists, etc., which are literally plug-and-play documents. A number of the documents from brand strategy 101 are in Bonfire and that you can immediately put into use in your business. For instance, the terms and conditions contract that I was talking about earlier in the presentation. My terms and conditions contract that I use and have used for a decade with my clients is in there and you can literally like take it and start using it for your business. Caveat after you get it reviewed by a lawyer. Um, and my brand strategy 101 course is available inside of Bonfire at a super steep discount. So, if you want to start learning about brand strategy, you can take that course at a 50% discount and then you're already in a coaching environment with me. So, as you implement that into your business, I'm there to actually help you do that and answer any questions that you have in person. And so, it's kind of a great it's a great vibrant community and the people lots of people who are in it have been in it since it launched two years ago. And uh so I highly recommend that you check it out if you're looking to really up your game on any level in terms of um being more successful as a creative entrepreneur or even there are people who are you know employed full-time in that group as well whether you want to kind of move up in your career and be more successful. And so that's just a little peak of what it looks like inside the Bonfire community which is on the circle platform. As I said, tons and tons of resources and tools inside and hit the wrong button, but that's okay. This is my Sky Cam. Um, that was actually meant to be this. And so, this has been awesome, you guys. And I I came in with time to spare, which is amazing considering the amount of information that I got through. And you know, project planning for design projects is I threw a whole lot of information at you today and I know that and I went through it and kind of amazing lightning speed. But as you work through and improve your creative process and planning process in your own business, like I said, Bonfire is a great place, great community with an extremely reasonable um membership rate to really get in there and make it a practice to up your game. And so if you found or heard anything in today's presentation that kind of made a light bulb go off for you, I'd love to hear about it in the chat to see if there was something in particular that you know kind of caught your ear or something that you've been doing that you somehow realized maybe you could do better or haven't been doing at all that maybe have been ignoring that could definitely make your business more successful. So I'm open to questions. I can hang out for a little bit uh to see if anyone has any questions about today's presentation. And so, let me scroll back just a little bit and see if we have anything. So, Peter Corks asked, "Should you ask the client what their budget is and if so, at what point in the process? " That's a really great question. And so, there's a lot of different schools of thought on this. Mine is that you want to learn as much about the company as you can in the first call before and you can talk money in the first call, but don't do it towards the end because you really want to have an understanding for how big the business is, kind of what their annual revenue is because your prices should reflect the size of the company that you're doing the work for. And you also want to understand the possible scope of how much work you could do for them or the real scope of what this project might be. For instance, if you throw out numbers too early in the conversation, say you're a website designer and you say, "My websites are they range from 5 to$10,000. " And then it turns out that the website that they want is a, you know, is a 200page e-commerce platform

website, you've just painted yourself into a really bad corner. And so you want to understand as much about the size and scale of the company and the particulars of what it is that they think they want and what you think they actually need in order to accomplish the goals that they want to accomplish. So when it comes time to start giving them a ballpark idea of what your fees might be, you can do that in a really educated way. So, at the end of that conversation, you might say, "It sounds like you're looking for a 25 to 50page e-commerce website. " Generally, when we do websites of that scale, our fees range from anywhere from 25 to $35,000 or they range from $10,000 to $25,000, whatever. Give yourself a big range, but set a stake in the ground in terms of your ability to give them idea of the level of, you know, professional services that you offer and the value of what it is that you do. Rarely is once that conversation is happening, even if you keep that discovery call, that initial one to about an hour, if they're sticker shock at that point and they go, "Oh my god, I was hoping I was going to spend $250. " And then you realize they're crazy that was somewhat misspent time. But here's the thing, it was only an hour. You learned a lot about the business. Sometimes they will come back to you anyway or they could refer you to someone even though they didn't end up doing business with you. But you want to learn as much as you possibly can and then give them a big range at the beginning. Then usually what I do is say I'm going to go offline. I'm going to give the scope of this project more thought and I'm going to shoot you an email with ballpark scope and ballpark fees. If you agree to that, let's have another call and talk about it in more detail. And then the next step is to do the fullyfledged proposal. So that's generally um how I recommend handling it. jumping into it too soon. Like I said, you can paint yourself into a corner, but to a certain extent, you have to you'll get a vibe of whether um and I generally do not say how much were you looking to spend because that's letting them put a stake in the ground and then no matter what you say and a lot of times they won't do it number one because they don't want to lock themselves in. So, it's just better to be able to put out there a realistic range of what you could do the work for and what is appropriate for the size of company that you're talking with. All right. Um, Jorge asks, uh, how do you handle clients that are creative versus non-creative? How does this change your design project planning? That is a really good question, Jorge. And what I would say is, and this is one of those things that I hear from creative professionals a lot, which is that I hate educating my clients. That is the biggest mistake a creative professional can make. Because if you can own and take the time to educate your client, you are controlling their understanding of the value of what you do. And so by educating them a way to show them what the value of the creative product it is that you develop is they will be much more likely to engage you and pay the level of fees that you have especially when the people are non-creative. I if it looks like a project, you know, a ballpark, you know, we're in the same range in the ballpark. Sometimes if it includes brand strategy, this actually often happens if I'm including brand strategy in a project, I will actually do a tutorial on what brand strategy is and how it fits into the creative process for the client. And that's an hour presentation where I walk them through a slide deck and a bunch of case studies, etc., and show them exactly how it works and why it's valuable to a company. And that can really get people on board quickly because you're controlling the narrative. You're making sure that you're, you know, communicating the value of what it is that you do and how that affects their business. So, creative or non-creative, it doesn't really matter. You want to control that. um that narrative and take it upon yourself to educate them the way that you think is appropriate to educate them. Now, if you're working with if you're a creative professional and you're working with other creative professionals, you have a bit of a shared vocabulary, which can make engagements easier. It can also

make them harder because sometimes creatives, you know, you know us, I mean, we can be, you know, kind of opinionated. We can have our own thoughts or ideas of how to go about things. And so that you have to treat with, you know, a little more sensitivity. Um the other thing about working with creative people is we also you know have our own um aesthetics and our own uh likes and dislikes and subjective opinions about creative. So grounding your work again in brand strategy and creative strategy narrows and takes that subjectivity out of it. So it makes it less important that creative person is actually creative or not. Because if you're both operating from a standing of making sure that the work is strategic in how it's being developed and how it's being chosen, then you have that shared goal and that shared vocabulary. Hope that was helpful. Um, all right. Laura says, "How much time is ideal to plan a project in advance? " Laura, that depends on a lot of different variables variables. It depends on how many phases are in the project. It depends on the scale of the company. So, it is a is it a $500,000 a year momand- pop bagel shop on the corner? Is it a $5 to$10 million B2B company? Is it a 50 to$100 million semi-tractor trailer rental company? What is the scale of the project? How many phases are there? How many stakeholders range? What's the range of approvals, etc.? How long is it going to take? What's being developed? There are a ton and ton of variables involved in it. But in terms of the time it takes to plan it, it can be a day. Like if you can get a ballpark proposal agreed to, so you're in the same range in terms of recommended scope and fees and then you're developing a proposal. Proposals that I developed take anywhere from four to seven hours to completely write out. Um, and once that proposal is signed off on, the amount of time that you spend to develop the project plan internally is to a certain extent up to you and how much specificity you need to have in that. If you're just using it internally, you're just developing it to the level of comfort and and detail that you need to have. If you're doing it for a client to a certain extent that project plan is driven by what their expectations are in terms of detail. So it can be to say how much time is ideal to plan a project. Ideally as little as possible because you're not getting paid to do the plan itself. But any kind of upfront work, as I said, that you do in advance is going to make everything downstream of that more effective, less chaotic, more fluid for everyone involved. So, I hope that perspective helps just a little bit. Okay, so you guys, this has been awesome. Oh, sorry, another question just popped in. Um Ia Horvath can a project be split into stages or should the proposal be done as a whole? Um okay so proposals generally when you do a project there may be like just like a single phase could be designing a logo right it could be you know doing a UX design for an app but the more complex a project is breaking it into phases is advantageous one because you can be very clear about what the process looks like and what the deliverable for each of those phases is, how much time each phase is going to take, how much each phase costs, etc. And so splitting a project up into stages or what I'm like I'd rather call phases is an advantage because it helps the client understand how they're moving through the project. It helps you calendarize the project. It also helps you develop the fees for a project. Breaking things into phases can help in a whole ton of different ways. One of the things that I didn't mention in the presentation, but I'll just mention really quickly right now. And that is that I mentioned that in my proposals when I have multiple phases, I will I

when I have multiple phases, I will put the fee down for each phase and I will actually show the fee in phases. But the thing you have to be careful or at least talk to the client about is that if for some reason they go, "Oh, I don't want to do the strategy phase. I just want to go straight to design. " And you had a chunk of money that you had, you know, kind of quoted for the strategy phase and they take that phase out, that of course brings the total down for the project, right? What I always say to the client when I send them that ballpark email is I say this is to considered to be a package fee and if any phases are removed the total price and quote will be adjusted meaning they're getting a discount for doing all the phases together and if they start pulling them out all cart sometimes phase prices go up. So, you just want to make sure that you give yourself that caveat that this is a package deal in this ballpark quote. And if you start pulling phases out, then that total product, that total, you know, price fee doesn't go down proportionally. Um, and it just gives you some wiggle room. Um, good. I'm glad that was helpful. All right, you guys. This been awesome. Thank you so much for joining me on this beautiful here in the Northeast Friday. Very sunny and warm. Very excited about that. It's been really, really wonderful talking to you today about um planning a design project. And if you are interested in the uh sorry, there we go. If you're interested in the Bonfire community, if you go to phipvandusen. com/bonfire, you can get more coaching, group coaching, like what I'm giving you here today, um, and make some incredible connections and meaningful network connections in the Bonfire community. So, I invite you to check it out. It'd be smart to join, I tell you. It's a great group. And with that, I thank you for your time. I really hope you got some valuable information out of today's presentation. And if for any reason you have any questions about it um and you join my email list, you'll get a series of after you join my email list, go to philipvandusen. com/muse, get on my email list um for my newsletter. The first email that you get if you just hit reply, it comes directly to me. So, if you have any questions about today's presentation or if you want to hop on a Zoom and talk about the Bonfire community, if that's going to be a right fit for you for your particular stage of your development or for the thing that you feel like you really need to work on, shoot me that email back and just say, "Hey, let's jump on a Zoom. I'd like to talk about Bonfire with you. " If you're seriously consider joining, I'd be happy to hop on a call with you directly and talk about that. All right, so you guys, this has been awesome. I hope you guys have a fantastic weekend and a great week next week. And I'll be going live next Friday, too. So, keep your eyes open, get on my list so you can get alerted to uh to what I'm going to be talking about next week. So, with that, thanks again and uh I'll see you guys later.