As a designer working in a marketing and advertising agency, I am often asked by clients to add or modify elements of a design based on their ideas of good design. Sometimes this works. And sometimes it doesn’t.
Design on its own can be pure aesthetic, but design for business requires a ground-up approach that respects heirarchy in content. Design should guide users in the proper direction, “proper” meaning towards the content you want them to see. This heirarchy is very specific, therefore, it is critical for the time and effort to be put into creating a solid order of priority of information before design. This ensures the flow is worked out prior to the designer jumping into the design process. This saves time, money and frustration for everyone.
Smashing Magazine did a good job of summing up this process in an entertaining and informative blog post about heirarchy in design. Check it out and chime in with your thoughts. – Janalee Budge
So true Janalee,
it helps quite a lot to invest more time in gathering all requirements BEFORE you start doing anything. Starts with a good creative brief and ends with agreeing and writing down strategic, business and communication goals. That gives the team later solid arguments to fight for their design and there will be no negotiation. Later, within the design phase of the work flow itself, Information Architects and User Experience Designer do a great job in structuring the content and prepare it for the visual design process. The deliverables of those guys are usually sitemaps, process flows, modules lists and wireframes. They obtain user testings with mock-ups and create also personae for their target audience. After all that; visual design can start.
Regards,
Marc-Oliver