Creative Director of Brand Nu, Radim Malinic shares his clever hacks for speeding up your workflows, getting new briefs completed on time and delivered to clients in a timely fashion.
Radim Malinic
Start with a strategy
The key to any successful project is the same as baking a great cake. Unless you’ve researched your ingredients, flavours and competition properly, you’re not going to win Bake Off. It’s as simple as that. Many clients are keen to rush straight into the design stage, or will limit a branding project to just the creation of a logo to ensure things get signed off quickly. But no creative should ignore the planning and research stages. When you build a brand, it’s important to create a strategy with great perspective. There are a number of websites and tools out there that can work to your advantage, such as Behance and Pinterest, which are great for finding examples of work that can inspire and help shape your strategy.
Create a moodboard
Once you’ve nailed your strategy, you need to communicate your vision to your clients and get their buy in. I’m a big fan of pulling together moodboards to share with clients. Adobe Stock is packed with features which are great for helping me to visualise my art direction ideas quickly and effectively. Visual Search allows you to search for similar images based on the characteristics of a selected image rather than entering keywords, whilst Aesthetic Filters allows you to search for images using characteristics such as depth of field or vivid colour,
Work on-the-go
Although pen and paper will always be the best tools to start any new project, I use a host of creative apps on my iPhone such as iA Writer and Adobe Sketch, when I’m travelling in between work and meetings. Jotting things down on the go or sketching new ideas whenever inspiration strikes is a great way to make sure you stay on track and don’t miss the details when working on a new project.
Face to face feedback
For so many years I’ve had to work on briefs set by others and I disliked the way the projects were managed. Too many long winded emails with hardly any visual information or feedback. When I brief other creatives, I always try to meet face-to-face or set up video conferences so we can share work, ideas and get questions answered there and then, saving on numerous rounds of amends.
Seamless collaboration
It used to be quite ‘action movie-like’ to get a hard drive with your work on it delivered to another creative via bicycle courier. Now I can’t think of anything more time-consuming. I work with creatives across different countries and time zones and I can’t imagine not working via cloud-based storage file transfer. Once the project files are delivered and set for artworking, it’s essential to have everything synced in one place. Whether it’s colour references or image files, Creative Cloud Libraries are indispensable to my day to day workflow, giving me quick access to the tools and assets I use the most.
