Great design starts with strategy

Great design
starts with
strategy

Without it, you're just hoping to get lucky.

Strategy is like building the foundations of a house. If the foundations aren't right, everything you build on top is at risk. You can have the most beautiful facade in the street, but if the foundation underneath is wrong, it's only a matter of time before the cracks show.

So before any design work begins, I want to know: Who are we talking to? Who are we competing with? What does this brand stand for? What role should it play in people's lives?

These aren't formalities. They're the difference between design that looks nice and design that actually does something.

But I also believe strategy should fit the project.

I once sat through a 100+ page strategy presentation for two SKUs of garlic bread. The client was bored. I was bored. Somewhere along the way, "having a strategy" had become more important than the strategy itself, and nobody in the room could tell you what problem all those pages were actually solving.

A two-product range doesn't need a manifesto. It needs clarity. A national rebrand across a twenty-SKU portfolio might genuinely need those hundred pages. The scale of the strategy should match the scale of the problem, not the size of the invoice.

Don't start anything until you fully understand the business problem you're trying to solve. Not just the brief.

Sounds really obvious, but I've seen too many designers take the brief and run with it without fully understanding the task at hand. A brief tells you what a client thinks they need. Strategy is the work of finding out what's actually true underneath that.

Question everything.

That's not a slogan I put on a wall. It's the actual difference between a designer who executes and a designer who solves problems. Anyone can take a brief at face value and produce something on time and on brand. Far fewer people ask the question that makes the client stop and go "actually... I'm not sure."

That question is usually where the real strategy begins.

Because design without strategy isn't really a shortcut. It just moves the risk further down the line, to the moment the pack hits the shelf and nobody quite knows why it isn't working.

Get the foundation right first. Everything built on top of it gets easier from there.