Our Design Process

Understanding Our Design Process

At Neurotic Dog Studios (NDS), there are five phases to our process. We address design the same way we handle branding and brand strategy.

Identify

Our initial meeting with you identifies what root problem(s) you are experiencing. From here, you and Neurotic Dog Studios(NDS) explore possible solutions. We’ve discovered that working directly with you through an agile brainstorming process results in better idealization and understanding of your issues and the wants and needs of your target audience. This process also allows us to explore solutions that may stretch your comfort level.

During this phase, the information gathered will evolve into a creative brief. The brief includes personas, a detailed explanation of the problem(s), the desired end goal, and listing all stakeholders, benchmarks, and the budget.

Once you’ve reviewed and signed off on the creative brief, we move on to the next phase: Discovery.

Discover

Our team will research the best way to reach the stated goal with the creative brief in hand. We’ll meet with you to discuss implementation considerations such as technology, production, and cost. We want you to be happy with the direction and implementation strategies. By identifying alternative paths, we can help mitigate unanticipated challenges. We may conduct market research to determine if the identified audience would respond positively to the proposed solution.

Create

Once we know the solution and our tribe, we must bring the two together. We start with stylescapes. Stylescapes go beyond traditional mood boards in that they present a complete experience. Through stylescapes, we create the visual and emotional language that will connect you with your tribe. The visual language includes colors, images, graphic patterns, and how these work together to cause an emotional reaction. You’ll approve a single stylescape.

Next, we develop more structured color, image style, type, and tone-of-voice standards. The specific items created will depend on the project scope. With who, what, and how determined, we design the assets needed to solve your problem(s). 

Feedback

We’ll meet with you to review and discuss the concept upon creating the initial artwork. We know that changes will be needed and that there may be compliance issues to address. Understanding this, we anticipate 2-3 rounds of revisions with every project. Once you give us the final approval and the balance due received, we move into the Delivery phase.

Deliver

Depending on the project, your final deliverable may be tangible printed items, or you may be receiving digital design files. NDS typically has all printed materials shipped directly to you. We use a file-sharing service such as DropBox, Google Drive, or OneDrive to deliver digital assets.

Neurotic Dog Studios will house your digital files for a minimum of six months. After that, your files may be archived but will remain available upon request for five years.