Style, Strategy & Story: what role does strategy play within the design process?

Continuing The Brand Identity’s partnership with Antalis Creative Power, The A Paper explores the often neglected and undervalued topics within the contemporary graphic design scene. For part two, we caught up with Two Times Elliott’s Strategy Director Dani Sampson (DS), Creative Partner at The District Alun Shooter (AS) and Mother Strategist and Play Nice co-founder Ayo Fagbemi (AF) to find out about the role strategy plays within their design process. EM: What role does strategy play in your design process? DS: Strategy gives function to form. It front-ends the design process to validate, challenge and add value to the client brief around their what, why, how and who. For us, it’s about finding the ‘pointiest’ part(s) of the research findings to craft market approaches. Each market approach is the narrative that customers engage with at a very top level (the core value proposition) and the design is a conceptual extension of that. And, in preparation for roll-out, we establish functional asset briefs to ensure outputs are designed to meet agreed objectives. Ultimately, strategy is the foundation and the scaffolding for the entire project.