23 Oct 2007 1121H

Artifacts during the visual communications design process

So the other day I ran into discussion about several different kinds of design artifacts, namely, mood boards, theme boards, and design keys. What are these things, when do we use them, why, how, who, blah blah blah?

To understand the contexts which forced these artifacts into being, we need to step back and remember the Bad Old Days. In the BOD, designers would generate comps — basically, whole layouts replete with colors, photos, typography, composition of elements, maybe some prototype interactivity, to show the client — and long ago, in the places where I worked we didn’t educate ourselves about the need to do much client research in those days, it was just pure decoration really. We were decorators.

And then inevitably, because all we were doing was just decorating, and because we didn’t educate ourselves, our clients, and our account people about the need for research or for controlling the design process and explaining what our process was, you had clients who took what can only be described as a Chinese restaurant menu approach towards our work, and they’d pick out elements they like from Comp 1, and elements they liked from Comp 2, and then they’d pat you on the head and send you on your way to Frankenstein all the pieces together, leaving you feeling very unhappy and wondering why you didn’t go into engineering like your parents wanted.

Well, eventually someone with a project management perspective woke up and said, that approach we’re taking is very risky because it consumes a large amount of time and resources, and we wind up assuming most of the risk during this phase while the client does not. If things go badly during the presentation and review of the artifacts, then that can quite dramatically impact our scheduling, resources, and profitability on the project. We need to stage gate the design process for ourselves and our clients so that we can chop up the risk into manageable pieces, and then we can make better use of resources and increase profitability.

Enter these artifacts.

The mood board, such as it is, explores the feeling side of look and feel. It’s an assemblage of images, clipped out of magazines, books, ephemera, or taken from the web, that evokes the visual mood of the piece. Is it scary? Is it serious? Is it warm? Is it high tech? Is it playful? These collages allow us to explore that dimension of the mood of the visual communications part of the program.

The theme boards in turn explore the look side of look and feel and is more tied to how the mood will be carried out in terms of typographic and color recommendations. They aren’t style guides per se, although they resemble them to a degree. They are explorations of type and color in order to get alignment on how the mood board will be brought to life.

The design key is then used to bring the mood and theme boards together in order to present an idea of how work together to produce the unified visual communications component of the design program. It is not a comp, although it resembles it in many ways.

These artifacts are then used as intermediary steps towards the eventual creation of comps and styleguides once the direction has been aligned around and approved, and they are both informed by, and must continue to be fed throughout the design process, as a result of the information that we UX practitioners generate.

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21 Dec 2007 1432H

Craig Minch writes:

Good writeup. A lot of talented individuals burned out trying to sort out and deliver that message. I propose the following additions seen below in in ALL CAPS.

…Well, eventually THEY LISTENED to someone with a project management perspective WHO woke THEM up and said that THE approach…

And now it's your turn.

Fire your weapon, soldier. Just be careful of friendly fire. NAME & EMAIL required.

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