Best Graphic Design Process for Maximizing Your Team's Creativity and Efficiency

For companies that ignore the importance of the graphic design process, this situation has happened time and time again.

When briefs are vague, expectations shift midstream, and miscommunications abound, even the most talented designers will struggle to produce. That's why investing in process — not just graphic design talent — is so important. Doing so is the only way to realize the benefits you expected when building your team.

So, if you're ready for your group to fulfill its potential, revamping your graphic design process could be the solution. A more defined process can save time, reduce rework, and help your graphics teams create more value for the company. This article will help you do it with a step-by-step breakdown, tool suggestions, and pro tips for balancing creativity with efficiency. Plus, access our Graphic Design Process Self-Audit Worksheet for you and your team at the end.

Why Your Graphic Design Process Matters

Your team’s graphic design process impacts how quickly it's able to produce high-quality marketing materials. A disorganized, messy strategy will typically increase timelines through communication gaps and more frequent edits. Defining your process makes each phase of it more intentional, which is the first step to optimization.

However, an overly strict strategy isn’t ideal, either — flexibility is key. Every designer’s brain works differently, so what sparks creative flow for one could stunt the work of another. You may also need to evolve over time as projects and team structures change. 

So, while having a process is important, there’s no singular solution that works for every brand. This guide will help you develop a framework to find the right strategies for your team’s unique needs.

Step-by-Step Graphic Design: Optimize Without Sacrificing Creativity

Think of the following graphic design steps as a starting point for developing your own process. You can follow these ideas exactly or mix and match to find a personalized solution that works better for your team.

Step 1: Creative Brief and Project Scoping

The first step is creating high-level overviews to guide future work. This gets everyone on the same page, establishes expectations, and sets the stage for the project. Your creative briefs should include details about:

• Objectives
• Target audience
• Deliverables
• Timelines
• Brand guidelines

Some teams turn these into living documents to promote collaboration throughout the design process. Building this kind of dynamism into your briefs will keep projects flexible and open more space for creative exploration. 

You may also want to include specific prompts for creative work. For example, you could add some visual elements that look like the graphics you want your team to create. Or you might consider the feelings you hope to evoke and the stories you want to tell.

Victor Blasco, CEO of Yum Yum Videos, brings the client and the creative team together for a collaboration session. He says, “This step is essential to ensure the storytelling is clear and purposeful, allowing us to build the entire design process around a strong narrative and creative vision.

Step 2: Research and Inspiration Gathering

After establishing a project’s goals, graphic designers move on to idea generation. This is easier after completing some basic research. Your team may want to:

• Create mood boards to organize visual ideas on platforms like Pinterest
• Research what competitors are doing visually and consider how your brand could differentiate itself
• Look for unrelated sources of inspiration in art, nature, and beyond
• Review any internal inspiration libraries you may have saved
• Consider brand feedback from current and past customers

Alexandr Korshykov, the CEO and Founder of DreamX, says his company’s research process “includes competitor analysis, user feedback, and business feedback if available. We write down all potential feature ideas, even those that might not be included later.”

Step 3: Brainstorming and Concept Development

Now you’re ready to take the ideas gathered in step two and zero in on the concepts that will go into your first draft. You may want to give individuals time to do that independently, but you can come together for collaborative brainstorming, too. 

Max Ridgeway, CEO and Founder of Filmit.xyz, says, “Collaborating with others ...helps refine ideas into a cohesive direction.” The process should involve divergent (creative) thinking and convergent (decisive) thinking.

For example, you might start with divergent thinking by throwing out all of your ideas without judgment, shooting for quantity over quality. Then, you can switch to convergent thinking, narrowing your approach toward a single strategy based on the objectives you laid out in step one.

There are a variety of exercises that can help your team brainstorm more effectively, including:

• Using time-box techniques to establish specific time periods for different parts of the brainstorming process, like ideation and group review
• Creating mind maps or other visual idea diagrams to group like-minded concepts together
• Assigning roles like idea creator and critic to sketch out the full pros and cons of potential strategies

Step 4: Design Execution and Iteration

At this point, you should have a good sense of the concept your team will try to create. The next step is bringing that idea to life, which typically means setting up a graphic design workflow and file structure in your design platform of choice (Figma, Adobe, etc.). You can save time by leveraging existing templates, asset libraries, and design systems.

As you work, think about balancing iteration with perfectionism. For example, you may want to get 80% of the design in a strong place, review as a group, then refine the last 20% instead of completing 100% before group review. It could also be helpful to set a cut-off point for iterations, such as regrouping after three rounds of edits.

Step 5: Feedback and Revisions

Once your team achieves a design it’s happy about internally, it’s time to share that concept with the client. Here are some tips for getting more out of that process:

• Set expectations early: Let your client know how many rounds of revisions are included and the kind of feedback you want from them. This lets them know how close you are to a finalized design and keeps the conversation moving in the right direction.
• Organize and prioritize feedback: Next, prioritize the feedback you get from the client. We recommend color-coded notes, using red for critical issues, yellow for suggestions, and green for optional edits.
• Avoid feedback fatigue and scope creep: Endless rounds of edits can stall momentum and derail a project. Try to avoid this by pushing back on non-constructive feedback. You may also want to prioritize real-time feedback sessions so you can clarify client notes immediately.
• Communicate limitations: Finally, don’t be afraid to communicate why some revisions may be impossible or impractical. Alexandr Korshykov tries to “explain to the client why [the changes] won’t work and how they will affect the UX."

Step 6: Finalization and Delivery

After incorporating the client’s feedback, you’ll be ready to finalize the project and deliver the results. Before doing that, run through a QA checklist covering details like colors, fonts, alignment, and accessibility. This final check will help you eliminate any lingering issues before they can impact the client.

You may want to prepare the graphics for different formats, creating optimized versions for print, digital, and social. But this depends on the project’s scope and the client’s needs. Regardless, you should build in buffer time and try to deliver before your final deadline to leave room for unexpected changes.

Step 7: Post-Mortem and Reflection

Finally, reconvene with your team to review the project and what you learned from it. Consider the problems you faced, how you overcame them, and any takeaways that will influence your process moving forward. You can kickstart this process with targeted questions like:

• What did we do well on this project?
• Where did we get stuck?
• Did our final result match the original brief goals?
• What would we do differently looking back?

It can also be helpful to track the amount of time that you spent on different phases of the project, using data from your project management platform or design software. This will help you identify bottlenecks in your process that may need to be smoothed out before the next project.

The Best Tools For Any Graphic Design Process

Creating a more defined process of graphic design is one way to improve your team's output; using the right tools is another. Hundreds of services, platforms, and apps exist to help teams organize work and improve collaboration. Here are some of the most important that we’ve found:

• Early inspiration: Pinterest, Dribbble, Behance, and Awwwards are great for discovering new ideas at the beginning of a design process.
• Color research: Coolors and Adobe Color are go-to options for researching and generating client-specific color palettes.
• Storyboarding: Figjam and Miro help teams create mind maps, thumbnails, and other key visual elements.
• Video production: Yum Yum Videos uses Wipster, which allows clients to leave frame-specific feedback for more actionable insights.
• Client collaboration: Figma and Adobe Creative Cloud enable real-time edits between design teams and clients.
• Other useful tools: Freepik works well for icons, illustrations, and templates, and ChatGPT for breaking through creative blocks. Many teams also use project management software to organize work, track changes, and enable client comments. Monday, Asana, and Notion are popular choices.

Each of these tools (and many others) can help your team get more out of its design process. The key is finding which tools work best for you, which can vary based on your work style, team size, and media production needs. Some of these platforms offer free trials, so you should be able to try a few potential solutions before committing to any financially.

Pro Tips for Preventing Creative Burnout in Your Graphic Design Process

Let’s wrap up with a few final pro tips for avoiding burnout while revamping your design process. Some of the most valuable strategies we’ve found include:

• Creating time blocks for creative and administrative tasks
• Scheduling “creative sprints” with meaningful breaks afterward
• Completing regular workflow check-ins to find and resolve challenges sooner
• Leaving time to rest and recharge throughout the day with coffee breaks, colleague chats, and walks

We’ll finish with a few quotes from the experts:

• “Clear time allocation for projects is essential — avoid taking time from one project to work on another. . . Don’t handle too many projects at once.” — Alexandr Korshykov
• “I schedule focused work blocks with breaks, rotate between different types of creative tasks, and carve out time for personal inspiration.” — Max Ridgeway

Free Resource: Build Your Own Ideal Graphic Design Process

Every design process is unique, but establishing a framework is essential to delivering high-quality creative work efficiently. That means starting with a project brief, searching for inspiration, executing with the right tools, and responding to client feedback as it arrives. There are many ways to achieve these goals, so try a few strategies to see what works best for your team.

You can get started with Clutch’s free online resources. Download our Graphic Design Process Self-Audit Worksheet below to reflect on how you and your team work, what’s helping or hindering your creativity, and where you can make small changes that lead to big improvements.

About the Author

Jeanette Godreau Senior Content Marketing Specialist at Clutch

Jeanette Godreau crafts in-depth content on web design, graphic design, and branding to help B2B buyers make confident decisions on Clutch.  

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