Process Makes Perfect: Telluride Arts

Sometimes it’s fun to take a step back and look at how we got from concept to execution. For the non-profit Telluride Arts, we were asked to create an at-a-glance Impact Report to help them raise awareness about all the arts projects their organization support throughout Telluride, CO. It was primarily an awareness piece but they hoped it would also help drive donations to their organization. We were on a tight budget, quick timeline, and had to keep to a standard format that their printer/mail house provided us. With all this in mind we got to work.

After we kicked off the project with the Telluride Arts team and did our initial discovery (reviewing brand guides, looking at previous assets, etc.) I crafted a multi-part creative brief to help us compartmentalize the project. Since we had to move quickly, we needed to break down the project into a few short sprints to ensure we were getting client input at every phase. This was to help us avoid any backtracking or surprises.

Step 1: Initial Brainstorm

The first step in our brief was to gather with the entire account team: producer, writer, account director, designer, and myself–and have brainstorming session to get all our ideas on the table.

I prefer to host brainstorms in a free flowing and casual format. I don’t want anyone to think they need to bring polished ideas. This is the point in a project where everything should come on the table without judgement. I generally give a few categories to concentrate on for the brainstorm, to give participants some structure. Then I encourage everyone to drop in imagery, gifs, links, videos, descriptions, notes whatever helps illustrate their ideas best.

We used the program Miro to gather inspiration and held a live Zoom session where we talked through everyone’s thoughts, discussed what was feasible, consolidated ideas that were similar, and starred our favorites.

Step 2: Mood boards

Then I enlisted the help of a designer, Christian Pederson, to pull together some initial moodboards to share with the client. In this instance he used some of the ideas that had come through in the brainstorms and also crafted some net new ideas that he and I reviewed and consolidated for a client presentation.

We collected feedback from the client in a live presentation. Overall they were most drawn to option 3 because they felt it fit their current brand best. However, they wanted to see some of the more bold applications and color from Option 1 incorporated into Option 3. With that in mind we moved into the next phase of the project.

Step 3: Recommendations

In this phase we gave two recommendations for design directions, formats, and paths forward for the story.

I generally set up design concepts in a presentation with a brief description of the concept and how it ties into any insights the client has given us up to that point. This is to reinforce that we heard their input and took it into consideration in our recommendations.

Concept 1: A Journey Through Telluride

Concept 2: History in the Making

The client ultimately decided that concept 2 worked best for the story they wanted to tell but they wanted to incorporate a bright pop of pink in place of the blue palette we recommended with the concept.

Step 4: Wireframes

For the next steps I helped craft a wireframe for us to work from. This was so the writer had a structure for word counts and the designer would have a solid grid system as a base for their work.

Step 6: Print

As a final step I coordinated with Telluride Arts preferred printer to ensure we delivered the files properly for them. After print they sent us a few copies of the brochure, reply cards and envelopes. There’s nothing quite like holding a print piece you’ve been working on for weeks once it’s complete.

If you’d like to know more about this process or have questions please reach out!

_{Art Director: Shana Fiduccia | Designer: Christian Pederson | Writer: Kassie Bohannon}