That is Stepping Gross. Welcome back to Stepping Gross Snacks. I'm Steph Ragnola and today we're talking about building a creative design strategy. I'm here with Monica Beasting, lead designer at Refine Labs and I'm so excited to have this conversation because Monica is a magician.
Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, excited to chat. Yeah, so we're gonna dive right into it. I am curious to know what was your favorite childhood snack?
I think my favorite childhood snack would have to be the Swiss cake roll because you can really make that last. Like you're under the chocolate exterior, the swirl. Sometimes if you want, you can unroll it too. If people are coming to you as a designer, before they even get started with a conversation, what are the elements that they should have prepared in terms of format, channels they're looking to reach, goals, what do they need to have before they even hop on Zoom with you?
I think the biggest thing is knowing how far they're willing to go. That's something that we started kind of implementing on our end, is this safe to spicy scale. And spicy doesn't always mean like extreme, it just maybe means pushing the expectations for what your brand is currently doing. I think it's good to know when you're coming in, how much work you want someone to do up front.
You don't want to waste anyone's time. If you're like, we like what we have and we want to keep running it. But at the same time, I think it's good to let people practice their expertise and their experts in their section because, and you're not for a reason, you're an expert in your own department. I really do love when someone comes in with an open mind.
That's really the biggest thing. But I think just knowing how far you're willing to push is a big, a big, like helpful stage of kickoff. If you've got an open mind, you're ready to get started. How do you help people who don't know what they want?
Their mind is maybe too open. There are too many ways that they could go. How do you help them ask questions to come up with answers to root their identity in certain design elements, like color or font or images, all of those things that they just might not know even where to begin? Yeah, so I think it's easiest to kind of lean towards the assumption that people aren't maybe visual thinkers and then you're always kind of happily surprised if they are.
But showing people examples of how these elements might be implemented, I think really helps, giving them something to point to and say, oh, that resonates with me. And even sometimes that's like a little bit of a personal preference, but getting to know who you're working with and those nuances of preference kind of helps everything. It makes the best product because of your spending, your time doing something that's going to succeed in the end. You can put more effort into the final product than maybe rounds of scrapping ideas that no one liked.
So I think experimentation in the beginning is especially important. And it kind of, again, to go back to that open-mindedness, pushing the boundaries in the first leg of the process and yeah, examples and people love examples. You just got to point and click. When you're coming up with examples to show someone, because I got that, I don't have it in my brain, but I can look at it and say, yes or no, right?
That's the easiest way for me to know what I like. Are there certain colors, certain styles, just like soft lines versus hard lines that you match naturally with different industries or different podcasts versus a LinkedIn ad versus a Facebook ad? Are there different design elements that you naturally match? A lot of the time brands in the same industry will have a lot of similar elements in their brand palette with colors specifically.
I usually try to pick the one that's farthest away from what their competitors are doing. You'll see blue and green everywhere, but there's also some psychology to it. So I know that if I'm working with something that's a little more food related, I tend to move towards reds and yellows. Like if you've ever kind of thought about why all of your fast food restaurants have red in them, that's some color psychology.
It might not come off right on the bat as something that your audience even knows they're noticing, but it does kind of place you in a realm where people know that your ad relates to them because it's the colors that they're used to seeing. So there are pros and cons of sticking with like the standard blue-green for medical, but wherever possible I try to add in a lot of pops of colors and to kind of turn that on their head and differentiate. Same with photography. A lot of the time everyone in your industry is using the same kind of stock photos and they start to bleed together.
So something I know that our team likes to do is think about the headlines and how we can use those to push the imagery. So you can still get your brand message across without showing that stock photo that everyone is using. You can maybe relate the messaging to some sort of like visual pun and use a picture that is catching attention because someone scrolling in their LinkedIn feed isn't used to seeing it. And same with kind of industries that are more approachable.
We tend to use like round corners versus sharp. Those are little nuances that I don't know again that many people notice, but it's all sort of that like subconscious design aspect. Or how do you know the line of going too far out of those standards versus standing out? Again, with those experiments we do in the beginning, people in the industry are still your target.
So if we've gone too far in our spicy experimentation and your team says absolutely not, number one, that's a really good indicator that no one in your industry is gonna think that that's for them. I think it's really important to experiment, especially in social. It's one of our kind of core values as experimentation. So sometimes you just have to test something new and see how your audience reacts.
We've definitely had success in sort of turning that imagery into something people aren't expecting. And we've had occasions where we've had to pull it back because someone is so used to seeing a certain kind of image in their feed that they're disregarding the ad if it doesn't have that. Awesome. This is a really great place to start.
We're gonna get into some of those real specific details in the next episode. So we'll see you all then.