Business Growth Brief · By Leanne Reichhoff
Someone asks what you want your new brand or website to look like. You can name a few colors, share websites you admire, and describe something about your current brand you would like to preserve.
You may also be thinking, “I’m hiring you because I need help figuring that out.”
That is a reasonable expectation. A business owner brings knowledge the creative team needs. The team brings responsibility for interpreting that knowledge and developing recommendations.
At Re3, Blind Brand® uses clarity and strategy to establish the shared direction that makes those roles practical.
Bring the Knowledge Only Your Business Can Provide
An outside team needs to understand the company’s history, relationships, capabilities, and ambitions. It needs to know what customers value, what has changed, and what leadership wants the business to become.
Useful input may include questions customers repeatedly ask, work the company wants more of, aspects of its reputation worth preserving, and misconceptions that make sales conversations harder.
Preferences can be part of that discussion. A color may have established recognition. A familiar symbol may matter to existing customers. A reference website may demonstrate a quality you want to communicate.
Explain what matters about the preference. That gives the team more to work with than a collection of visual examples alone.
Establish Criteria Before Reviewing Creative Work
Creative decisions become easier to assess when everyone understands what the work needs to communicate and accomplish.
The criteria should come from the business and its intended audience. They may include making a complex offer understandable, reflecting the quality of the company’s work, preserving useful recognition, or communicating a more accurate position.
Practical use matters too. A visual identity needs to work where the company uses it. Website content and design need to help people find information and understand the next step.
Without shared criteria, reviews can become a collection of individual tastes. One person prefers a color, another favors a different image, and a third likes a layout from another site. The team still needs to decide which choices serve the agreed direction.
Expect Recommendations With Reasoning
A creative team should be able to explain how its recommendation responds to the strategy.
That explanation needs to be specific enough for the client to evaluate. “It looks modern” may describe a visual impression, but it does little to connect the work to the company’s customers or objectives.
A more useful discussion explains what the design emphasizes, how the messaging helps someone understand the offer, or why the page structure supports the way people make decisions.
Sometimes the team will recommend something you would not have chosen independently. You should have room to ask questions and understand the reasoning. If the work misses an important business truth, that needs attention. If it simply differs from your initial preference, the shared criteria can help you assess it fairly.
Give Feedback That Helps the Team Solve the Issue
Feedback is most useful when it identifies what feels inaccurate, unclear, or inconsistent with the direction.
For example, “This makes us look focused on residential work, but commercial projects are central to our direction” gives the team a concrete concern to address. “Move this image and make the headline larger” proposes a specific change without necessarily explaining the underlying issue.
Clients can suggest solutions, but they should not have to diagnose every creative decision. Explain the concern, connect it to the business, and give the team room to recommend how to resolve it.
When several people are reviewing, consolidate feedback and identify who has final approval. That helps the team distinguish a business requirement from conflicting personal preferences.
How Blind Brand® Builds Confidence in the Direction
Blind Brand® begins with understanding the business and establishing strategy before creative development. The strategic preview provides a point to confirm the visual direction before the broader website experience is developed.
The completed brand and website are then presented together. That allows the client to experience how messaging, visual identity, and website work as a whole.
The client helps establish and confirm the direction. Our responsibility is to carry it through the work and explain the recommendations that support it.
Before reviewing visual examples for your next brand decision, write down what the work needs to communicate, whom it needs to serve, and what should be preserved. Those answers give both you and the creative team a stronger basis for judging the result.
Learn more about the Blind Brand® experience through Re3.
