How do we ensure consistency across 10,000+ design assets a month?

Post by Liam V.

When you’re paying by the minute, revisions are the enemy. Every month we deliver thousands of individual files destined for quick release, so it’s vital that we get it right first time, 99%+ of the time.

Sure, there will always be revisions. But there’s a difference between revisions and mistakes. In our experience, it’s the mistakes that drive marketing teams up the wall.

Our not so secret sauce:

Three-tier QA

I grew up in the ‘90s, when the iconic TV series ‘Gladiators’ was all that Saturday nights were known for. So I’ll put this in the context of ‘The Gauntlet’.

A narrow flow with three battle-tested team members for your asset to make it through before you even see it.

1. Project Manager, ready

The first person to rebuff or approve your asset is your?Project Manager. Friendly, polite but ruthless in the pursuit of nailing your brief.

They’re familiar with the brand, understand your mission and can sense check copy (we have a typo-free guarantee). They also template precedents, compliance terms and ensure that what we’re proposing aligns with the brief.

Only once they check it off does it progress to the next stage.

2. The valley of peers

Next up is a?peer review,?where another designer will sense check whether the asset ‘feels right’ design wise. Space, balance, colours, layout, kerning, image choice (hey! we used that stock image last month), detail, precedents.

This step is crucial as small slips and shifts in creative do happen, so keeping a designer honest by having them share with a colleague ensures attention to detail from the outset.

After the check mark here it’s time for the final boss, a senior creative or brand champion.

3. Final boss – brand champion and senior creatives

Where volume is high, we nominate a brand champion – a more experienced creative trained on your brand, who guards the expanded brand guidelines that we create for you. You may never see this but it’s a Notion library of rules, layouts and templates to ensure consistency across team members. They’re the pride and joy of the brand champion.

Often carried out by a Design Lead or Creative Director, this review acknowledges the previous steps but applies a ‘zoomed out’ approach.

Will this work in the wider suite of brand assets? Will it actually achieve the goals of the campaign? Is it coherent with everything else we’ve delivered this week?

We’re not only reviewing the asset, but how it fits into the bigger picture of the brand and whether this creative works for the channel it’s destined for. How might we improve it to be even more effective? Most often this person has a direct line to you and has extra context in terms of business direction or commercial goals that a day-to-day team do not.

So they bring all of that experience, context and channel awareness to the table to apply any final improvements.

Then what

If I may wring out the final juice from that Gladiators analogy; by the end of the process your creative stands tall, strong and triumphant – ready for your audience. You get the link and can apply notes directly to creative or press that lovely emerald green approve button.

Of course, the copy may change or we may need to use a different image or new offer, but this process ensures that mistakes are well under 1% guaranteed (our current average is 0.3%).

This process is fast too, often moving through those three tiers in under an hour as we’re doing it all day every day.

Someone has to do this job. You or us?

As a marketer, if you’re relying on individuals and small teams for creative work, it’s impossible to match this sort of diligence. You often step into the gauntlet yourself, which takes time away from what you should actually be doing. You may even have to be all three checkpoints, which triples the workload.

This is just one of hundreds of processes unique to our agency that go into solving design workflow.

It’s far more efficient yet cost comparable to hiring and doesn’t have the lofty rates of agency world.

If your design team is stacked and you need help delivering creative at scale, then let’s have a chat about Design on Demand. More campaigns, across more channels, more consistently. From ￡4,000 per month.

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