on-demand design,on-demand graphic design service,online graphic design

New to Deer Designer? What designs to ask first

changing priorities illustration
Your priority is our priority.

I love going on road trips with my family. I’m usually the one in charge of preparing the food and organizing the clothes. One night when I was busy packing, my husband proposed we should postpone the trip.

Disappointed, I asked why. He said that the car was due for a maintenance check-up and we shouldn’t go without having it done first.

“You’ll drive carefully anyway, we won’t get into an accident”, I said dismissively.

“I can be the best driver but if the car stalls, we still won’t be able to get to the destination,” he said.

He was right. So for everyone’s safety, I rebooked the accommodations to open a schedule for the car maintenance.

On the day of the trip, we were driving at 100kph on the expressway when a van abruptly stopped in front of us. My husband slammed on the brakes hard and our car stopped inches away from the vehicle.

The scary part? From the prior check-up, it was found that the brake pads needed replacing.

Thank God we had new ones installed before going on the trip.

First things first

Most people focus on organizing their clothes and the itinerary once they arrive at their destination when planning a road trip. 

Many people fail to prepare the necessary items before they travel. This includes clearing their schedule at work and having their car serviced.

When it comes to marketing or advertising campaigns, we sometimes get so focused on the finished product or final event that we forget that in order to get to the end, a series of tasks must be completed first.

In this article, I’ll show you how to queue designs in your pipeline to ensure their smooth delivery with less cramming and fewer revisions.

The Eisenhower matrix (of design)

The Eisenhower Matrix is a task management tool that allows you to organize and prioritize tasks based on their importance and urgency. 

Use the tool by dividing your tasks into four boxes based on what you will do first, schedule for later, delegate, and what you’ll delete.

All kinds of design are important for us. That’s why a variation of this matrix will illustrate that design projects can be divided into those that require high-level design and conceptualization skills and those that do not.

This is a variation of the Eisenhower matrix that displays designs that we can deliver, arranged by complexity and urgency. 

The goal is to fill your design team’s pipeline with tasks and help you in deciding which ones to prioritise as urgent, high, medium, or low.

The matrix will be very helpful if you are starting from scratch and are still developing a timeline for your campaign and deliverables.

matrix of design priority eisenhower matrix of design

Advanced and urgent designs

Brand Guidelines are the pillars of consistent visual branding. Your partners in marketing, art, and advertising need this document as their bible in creating design and campaigns. This is their manual.

A branding guide requires not only high-level design skills but must also be completed before proceeding with any design.

Aside from brand guidelines, prioritise lining up web design for your brand or for your clients if needed.

Your website serves as your storefront. With billions of businesses owning a website, you need yours to be up-to-date and well-designed. 

This type of design must be queued as soon as possible because it involves many pages and several revisions before it is completed.

Advanced and non-urgent designs

A mid-sized marketing campaign would require at least two months of planning. This gives us more than enough time to create designs like lead magnets, illustrations, and print designs.

If your campaign has a theme, feel free to create a long ticket requesting all of the marketing collateral you need. As each item is completed, the account manager will notify you so you can give feedback as soon as you can.

Design experiments and redesigns also require the services of a highly creative, professional designer. Although they are not urgent, they require a lot of creative juice.

Your Deer Designer is well-versed and battle-tested in this subject. They have years of experience and are fully prepared. To add to that, they are supported by their entire squad’s skills and knowledge to improve the designs to your liking.

Basic and urgent designs

Most designs are considered urgent depending on the deadline and the platform where the design will be featured. These are typically social media designs and pitch decks.

Social media channels require fresh content every day, and web agency owners are frequently stressed as they try to meet deadlines and might end up posting something they aren’t 100% happy about.

You can request a month’s worth of social media graphics in any size variation you might need. Your design team can work as quickly as humanly possible, but it is always preferable to plan and request your designs ahead of time.

Basic and non-urgent designs

Deprioritized designs were once urgent but you or your client’s plans may have changed that’s why they’re pushed back. In Deer Designer’s queuing system, you can easily change your priorities without losing track of the design project.

You can still revive or revisit these tickets as needed and your designer can pick up where you left off, saving time in the process.

Action expresses priorities

As the owner of a web agency, you are most likely working on multiple projects at the same time. This is one of the most challenging aspects of the job. You must first know what to prioritize to focus on the important stuff.

I understand how difficult it can be to choose which designs to request first when there are so many options. With this post, I hope you have some new ideas to help you make the right decisions.