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The Creative Director’s Checklist: The ultimate guide to effective brand building from Frontify
Created in collaboration with D&AD, the checklist helps creatives and designers to sharpen their focus, simplify their workflows and unleash their imaginations.
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This year, Frontify released The Creative Director’s Checklist – a guide to cultivating creativity and overcoming the challenges involved in building an impactful and cohesive brand. Aimed at decision-makers and thought-leaders throughout the creative industry, the checklist was created off the back of a survey carried out by Frontify in which it spoke to people in these specific roles at brands all around the world. From this survey, Frontify discovered that the biggest obstacle to creativity was, surprisingly, not a lack of it, but rather an issue of organisation. In other words, creatives aren’t in need of more creativity – they’re in need of better ways of structuring it, sharing it, and creating a space in which it can thrive.
The survey revealed three clear problems that many creative directors (CDs) and design leaders face in their day-to-day: the first was a lack of time and the need for faster results; the second was a lack of brand alignment and shared creative vision; and the third was a lack of collaboration and communication across brand networks. These issues not only slow the creative process down, but actually hinder creativity by not allowing CDs the room they need to unleash their imagination, and not providing them with the tools they need to execute their ideas properly.
The result is that many CDs around the world (the survey featured respondents from the UK & Ireland, the US, Australia, Brazil, China, Japan and South Africa) experience stunted growth and job dissatisfaction. In fact, 70 percent of the CDs surveyed agreed that “lack of time is the main problem that prevents memorable creative output”, while 67 percent said their organisation or client “didn’t have a shared strategy for the brand”, and 57 percent said they “struggle with people and departments not cooperating well”.
According to Frontify, the initial step for any CD or creative leader should be to audit your brand, and take stock of what works and what doesn’t. Given that the primary obstacle faced by respondents was organisational, this step, as with all of the steps in the guide, is less about strategy, ideation and execution, and more about what needs to be in place for these processes to run smoothly. Some things to consider here are the quality, quantity and location of your assets, how many of these are reused vs recreated (with the latter requiring more time) and how easy it is for all relevant teams to access these assets.
“Consumer insights are integral to our design process.”
Rapha Abreu
Crucially, these audits should take place on a fairly frequent basis to have the desired effect. Not only does this ensure that assets are easy to use and easy to find, but it also ensures that they are in keeping with the brand’s wider visual language and systems. Speaking on this, Rapha Abreu, global vice president of design at The Coca-Cola Company, says auditing is an important task there: “We conduct regular audits of our brands’ visual identities to ensure they remain distinct and relevant,” he explains. “This process involves reviewing all brand assets globally, from packaging to digital interfaces, after every large program, ensuring they are aligned with our core design principles of distinctiveness and consistency.”
Following on from this audit, the next step involves asking a key question: to reaffirm, refresh or rebrand? Depending on the current state of your brand, minor updates may suffice, or a complete overhaul might be in order. To help you make that decision, you should lean on user and consumer insights to figure out how to better serve their needs. At Coca-Cola, this is yet another integral aspect of building and maintaining the brand: “Consumer insights are integral to our design process,” Rapha tells us. “We leverage both qualitative and quantitative research, including AI-generated personas and focus groups, to understand how consumers interact with our products and brands. This helps us align our designs with consumer expectations and cultural shifts, which is key in creating relevant and enduring design experiences.”
Alongside making these decisions, action also needs to be taken to ensure that whatever work is done to the brand is future-proofed for all teams involved. At the centre of this step is the creation of a brand portal, where creatives within the company can easily access the brand guidelines and any other resources that are essential to brand-building. This can be a daunting task, with so much information to pack in, but global head of brand at Mozilla Amy Bebbington says using Frontify for the portal transforms it into a straightforward feature: “Brand.mozilla.com is our new brand site where Mozillians can access brand assets and guidelines at any time,” she explains, “[and this] is built on Frontify, which touts a user friendly-interface paired with robust features, including DAM capabilities and the ability to integrate other platforms such as Contentful and Figma.”
“As brand designers, systems are critical for us because they are how we maintain brand consistency.”
Amy Bebbington
Speaking of DAM (Digital Asset Management), Frontify has also listed an effective DAM structure as a crucial part of “building for the long term”. Step four in the guide insists that putting this in place will safeguard against resource waste, slowed workflows, and asset inconsistencies. Building on the earlier steps, a solid DAM solution will allow for a more time-efficient approach, encouraging file reuse, asset updates and a simpler workflow across the board. Taking care of this is especially important for CDs and other team leaders who are dealing with multiple brands at once, as attested to by Amy. “As we work on other portfolio brands throughout the organisation, we also put those updated guidelines on the same site, creating one centralised location for brand materials and resources,” she says. “This makes it easier for and allows our colleagues to make updates as part of their workflows when they come across older assets.”
It goes without saying that for CDs working across several teams, and with several brands, simplifying their remit is essential, and Frontify’s next step in the Checklist gets to the very heart of this issue. “Automate with templates” may sound a bit clinical, but the advice here is sound. Thoughtful use of templates, tools and AI-ready structures makes a CD’s life far easier, and rather than hindering creativity, actually allows it to thrive by cutting down the time spent on unnecessary routine requests.
This is something Rapha knows only too well, saying that the Coca-Cola team “uses digital templates extensively to ensure consistency and efficiency while scaling design content across touchpoints globally”. He continues: “Recently, we have been exploring AI solutions to enhance this by allowing regional teams to create locally nuanced, on-brand content better and faster. With features like AI-driven customisation and automated workflows, it helps streamline creative processes while maintaining high design quality standards.”
Amy adds to this, saying “as brand designers, systems are critical for us because they are how we maintain brand consistency, and templates are the best and most efficient way to scale that across our organisation and any designer working with our brand system. Our design teams, like a lot of the industry, create a lot of templates in Figma, and as we create we’re really oriented towards thinking about what we can templatise. Templatised components have also been a big part of the digital ecosystem work. The trick there is to create enough guidance without limiting creativity or restricting brand personality.”
“Analytics is the key to keeping the whole brand on track.”
Frontify
Indeed, guidance is the name of the game here – hard and fast rules can actually end up destroying the very thing they were created to serve. Crucially, true creativity calls for occasional challenging of the status quo, and far from destabilising a brand’s system, this process actually keeps it healthy and up-to-date with cultural and industry developments. In the same spirit, the final step of the guide is all about “measuring progress continually”. Frontify writes that “analytics is the key to keeping the whole brand on track,” and this has been proven time and time again.
Studying your DAM and portal analytics can help to inform a brand strategy that is sustainable and adaptable. Keeping on top of this will ensure that teams are consistently using assets wisely, simplifying day-to-day tasks, and generally saving time that can be allocated to more important things, like “dreaming big”. For Frontify, the latter is by the far the biggest benefit of a strong brand-building system, with the team writing that it gives you “the most important resource any creative can have: time”. They continue: “A centralised solution with a robust DAM, collaborative tools, and automated tasks optimises daily operations and adaptability to major changes. Consistent brand usage promotes efficiency and effectiveness in the long run. This setup builds the foundation for bigger, faster, and more daring creative projects.”
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Further Info
Frontify is one of the world’s leading brand-building platforms. By combining a user-friendly DAM with customisable brand portals, Frontify enables creatives and marketers to design, organise, and collaborate. Established in 2013, the SaaS company employs around 300 people and helps service more than 10,000 brands in over 200 countries. Frontify is based in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and has additional offices in New York City, USA, and London, UK.
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