The creative process decoded: 5 steps for efficient creative asset production

You have the skills. You have the brief. But does your creative team have the process it needs?

Creative teams are under pressure to deliver on an unprecedented scale without sacrificing quality. They're challenged to maintain a fine balance between quick and efficient content production and intense quality control. There's a constant demand for new imagery, video, text, graphic design, and brand assets — sometimes with the added complication of regulatory compliance.

Today, we're looking at how to build a creative workflow that supports efficiency and quality at the same time. We'll examine the steps of the creative process and show you how you can improve your team's process to innovate at the next level.

What we'll cover

What is the creative process?

While the creative process may vary somewhat between teams, established creatives understand that the general concept applies across the board: It’s how you come up with concepts, test them out, refine them, and finally deploy them. 

If your role is in creative operations, then your creative process is likely to be collaborative. Unlike the stereotype of a lone wolf, your own creative process involves a team. Different creatives, stakeholders, and brand managers work together on the creative journey. That creates opportunities — and challenges.

Challenges in the creative process

The creative process is never easy. After all, there's a stereotype of the tortured artist for a reason.

However, the challenges for creative teams are different. You can trust your team to already have skills in their own disciplines (and to take care of the whole "tortured artist" thing on their own time).

Instead, your biggest challenges are operational factors: deadlines, budgets, compliance, and above all, communication.

Time and budget constraints

Whether your team is in-house or at an agency, you'll have to contend with strict budgets and deadlines. You could spend months workshopping ideas, but the client expects a working prototype by Monday morning.

Creative teams want to produce their best work while squeezing every last drop from their time and resources. For that, they need an efficient creative process so that they can work at pace.

Maintaining brand compliance and consistency

When you work for a brand, you're not creating freely — at least, not entirely. There’s a fine line between innovation and overextension, which is a tough balance to strike. Your creative project has to line up with your brand identity, messaging, business goals, and industry regulations.

If you can't consistently apply brand compliance, then clients will be unhappy with the quality of your deliverables. And if you can't consistently apply regulatory compliance, in certain industries, you could face legal consequences.

The first stage for teams is creative thinking. While you might do some market research to inform your work, the most important tasks are brainstorming and ideation.

This is a collaborative part of the creative process, so both stakeholders and everyone on the team should be involved. Even if you have a clear brief, it's important to involve stakeholders at this stage, so that you can be sure your ideas are on the right. Let's take the creative design process as an example. Starting from a rough concept, you'll use design principles to build it up into a basic version. Whether you’re working on visual or written content, you'll still need to communicate with other team track. Once you have a solid concept to draw on, you can start fleshing it out. 

The second stage of creativity is design and development. This is when you apply critical thinking to your original ideas.

During this stage, software that supports collaborative design becomes helpful. Creative collaboration tools like Ziflow can streamline the process of mocking up visuals, tracking changes and comments, recording multiple versions, and adding questions or tasks for other team members.

3. Prototyping and feedback

In the third stage, you'll produce a prototype or draft of your design to share with others. Feedback from team members, stakeholders, and test audiences will make sure that your work isn’t just high quality, but that it’s true to the original idea.

This is also a good stage to check for compliance and brand governance so that they're not an afterthought later in the process. Compliance requirements vary by industry, so if you want to stay out of trouble with the law (and your legal department), check, double-check, and then check again.

(Bonus points if you make marketing compliance a standardized part of your creative process. Here’s how.)

4. Revision and refinement

Most creative assets will go through several different stages of feedback, review, and revision before they're approved. At each stage, you'll need to refer back to your brand guidelines, project objectives, and regulations.

This stage of creativity can seem slow and frustrating, particularly if your stakeholders don’t always give the most actionable feedback. However, the right review software will make it easier to spot problems, discuss decisions, and assign tasks, speeding up the process and leaving you with more space for creative thinking.

5. Production and deployment

The final stage of creativity is applying the finishing touches and handing over the final deliverable. Depending on the asset, there are some final production checks needed at this stage, like quality checks, bug testing, format adjustments, and optimizing visual assets for different platforms.

Once again, it's a team effort. Your creative team might not be the people deploying the assets or launching the campaigns, so before you hand over, make sure that the client has all the information they need for a smooth and successful deployment.

Best practices for improving the creative team processes

If you want to produce more creative work, the best thing you can do is improve communication and efficiency in your team. That gives them more time for creative thinking — plus more opportunities to spark ideas off each other.

Train and develop your creative team’s skills

More training means more efficiency, whether it's in soft skills (like brainstorming) or hard skills (like learning how to use new software). Even experienced creatives can still benefit from continuous education!

Foster a collaborative environment

The best creative work comes from trying new things and taking risks. But that won't happen if your team is scared to speak up or receive criticism.

You can boost your team by cultivating an open, collaborative environment. It should be rigorous, but supportive. Take the lead by encouraging creatives from different disciplines to brainstorm together and share constructive feedback on each other's contributions.

Standardize your creative process

Standardization might sound strange for creativity — after all, isn’t being creative all about thinking outside the box?

But standardization can elevate your output in two ways. First, it can speed up the boring, everyday tasks that waste time. Second, it can guide you toward a more consistent creative output. When you standardize the creative process, you standardize a level of excellence for your team. There's a framework in place so that every asset you create attains the same quality.

Implement the right processes and tools to enhance creative productivity

To make sure your creative process produces the highest caliber assets, go back to the basics:

• Create brand guidelines to build compliance into projects from the beginning.
• Use templates for content formats that you work with often.
• Train everyone on the same processes and software for brainstorming and feedback.

These are easy ways to streamline and elevate creative projects without dampening creativity.

Facilitate feedback with a collaborative proofing tool

A collaborative proofing tool is software that helps you review creative assets in production. Internal teams, stakeholders, and clients can view the project and add pinpointed, specific feedback directly.

With Ziflow, you can even assign tasks, start discussions directly on the asset, and track progress through version comparison — all within the same platform.

By centralizing the review and approval process in one tool, creative teams can respond to feedback more effectively, taking in client comments and creating higher quality assets. 

Automate review and approval workflows

Collaborative proofing software has another benefit: you can set up automated workflows to review and approve work.

For example, with Ziflow, you can automate the review process so that clients are automatically assigned a review task at the right stage in the process. No more hours spent chasing down stakeholders for feedback.

Automating manual tasks like this frees up resources to focus on the real creative work. Result: less stress for your team, with higher quality output.

Learn more about optimizing your creative team’s processes

Creative teams are one of the greatest assets a brand has. But they have to battle against deadlines, budgets, bottlenecks, and communication issues that can put a damper on the creative process — without the right tools.

Ziflow is collaborative proofing software built for creative teams. Not only does it centralize the review and approval process for efficient and speedy deliveries, but it also removes the tedious manual element of task assignments and compliance checks with automation and workflows.