Welcome back to Sacking Growth Snacks. I'm Steph Canola and today we are talking about building a creative design strategy. I'm here with Monica Beasting, lead designer at Refine Labs. Monica, thank you so much again for coming back.
I got you back and we're going to talk about how you do what you do. I mentioned in the first episode you're a magician, but I'm going to ask you to reveal some of your secrets today. I guess we can take a peek behind the curtain. Perfect.
So someone has come in, they've got an open mind. They've told you generally the elements that they want to use. They want a certain color scheme. They want soft lines.
They want a person in their ad. How do you as a designer take now a blank square and start to build that ad design? So I think people approach this differently, but from my experience, what I've kind of done is there's a lot of loopholes within someone saying I need a photo of a person. So the first thing I do is think, how can I make this interesting right from the start?
Am I filtering it with a color or a gradient? Am I kind of getting out of its background? Am I putting it in a bounding shape? Those are all things that can add a lot of personality to the same photo.
You can use the same photo across three ads and look completely different depending on those decisions you're making. One thing I'll do is kind of look in the brand guide that I'm provided and see if there's any unique shapes or aspects that maybe I can utilize as background texture or like I mentioned, a frame around a photo. And then that's where color comes into play too. Do we want gradients?
Do we want a color shape against a solid color background? Do we want a monochrome ad? All within these limitations, there are a lot of different combinations you can make that give you like a really different atmosphere or look. And my goal in doing this is to create something unique to that brand.
So I don't want to be kind of looking at their competitors and just duplicating. I want to see what their competitors are not doing and try to use that. And so that's something that I imagine you do a lot of research in when you're starting to build. So you see what's out there and then you think about how you can make it different.
I didn't even realize like if there's a person that there are so many different things that you can do to manipulate that it doesn't just have to be a stock photo on all turn. And then we kind of also when possible take the stock photo and pick something that's maybe not a person. So if there's a pun or some type of metaphor similarly that we're using in the headline, we can still work to tie that back to brand values while opening up a whole new realm of stock imagery. So instead of a person, maybe it's a race car to convey speed of your product.
No one wants to always see the same picture of maybe a developer sitting at their computer. So can we create a matrix type realm of code that some things existing in? There are definitely ways to tie it back to what you're trying to communicate, but all it takes is intention. Let's talk about intention for a couple minutes.
I want to know when you have this conversation with your client, their goals are to put this ad in front of people and to get sales from it, right? Like a fundamental, that's the goal. But what else are they saying with an ad? How are they portraying their values and their goals as a company through the art that they choose to use as an ad?
The trap most people fall into is looking exactly like their competitors, but at a certain point, all of that starts to feel really templatized like you didn't put any effort in. And this is your first introduction to someone possibly. You want them to know that you're thoughtful that there's time spent behind not only the ad created, but the product you're trying to sell as well. So I think showing something that clearly has time and thought behind it does a lot to create trust in your brand, same with websites.
You don't want a messy, templatized homepage that you're sending everyone to. And why would I pick you if you just downloaded the same thing everyone else is doing? It conveys that same message of why are you different from all of these other people? Because to me, you look the same.
I love that. That's really that's great advice. If you don't look like you've put time and effort into your creative, then how do I know you'll put time and effort into your product? So we've talked a lot about differentiating from the millions of ads that are out there.
What are some scroll stopping elements that you kind of jumped to when you need them? Some things that you tweak just to make them stand out in the sea of other very similar ads in an industry? So one big one we really use is kind of spicy as we call it internally spicy language. Now that doesn't always mean necessarily cursing, but appealing to the people on the other side of the feed.
Like everyone loves humor. Everyone loves cleverness. So that is something that's been really successful for us. Instead of maybe the traditional upfront value prop, you're framing it in a way that is a little more entertaining to people.
No one wants to read an essay on your brand. So short concise headlines, really bold type treatments do a lot. Honestly, anything where you're not asking people to dive too far into the graphic to gain interest. An eye-catching graphic that someone's curious about to read more or on the other hand, something that communicates what you do in an instant.
They're only having to skim two or three words to get there. I think in general, people want to be entertained when they're on their phone, even if it's linked in appealing to the new, the exciting, the don't make me work for it. If you're scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, if I have to do work to figure out what you're trying to say to me, I'm just going to scroll past it. That's not going to stop.
If I see a clever pun or an image that's been manipulated in the way that you were talking about earlier, I'm more likely to kind of pause and look into what that saying. And the same for again, making ads that look like all of your competitors or all of your other ads, if you've been using a template, my assumption as I'm scrolling is I've already seen this and I'm going to keep scrolling past it. It's kind of at a glance showcasing that there's new content for someone to digest. And you mentioned earlier, you take a look at the brand guidelines that you've been given.
How far do you usually go with manipulating the lines and the colors and the shapes that they have to make them new and fresh? You can't change their logo, but how do you take that and make it something more interesting for a feed? So this might be a controversial take to some designers, but personally, I think social is where you should be pushing the brand to its kind of max limitations. Obviously, we want a brand identity to still be there, but it's so important to create new content for social.
It's so fast moving. If you're strict about your brand guides to like the point where everything looks the same, I think you're missing out on opportunities. Some easy ways to do that are maybe include some secondary colors that aren't in your overall brand guides, but start to work their way into their ads. And also stepped implementation, creating a familiarity with the people viewing your ads of the new elements.
We don't need to drop a new campaign that looks nothing like anything we've ever done, but maybe in round five versus round four, we test this new element. Or what if we make two of the ads a little bit different than we did before? And then now in that next round, we haven't established reference from the last round that we're building on. Amazing.
Now you're getting into the revision process, which we are going to dive headfirst into in the next episode. So we're going to call it there and see you all next time.