Web designers are, perhaps, among the least appreciated marketing professionals. Yet, their output is undoubtedly a critical part of the success of any digital marketing campaign. It doesn’t matter if you specialize in search engine optimization (SEO), content, or paid ads. If the online asset you’re promoting has poor web design, your campaign will probably fail before it even begins.
If you have qualified web designers working with you, consider yourself lucky. Under good leadership, web designers can provide incalculable value to any online asset, making it engaging and current without unnecessarily compromising any business goals.
There lies the rub. Web designers may not necessarily see your goals in the same way you do. Unless they have experience in other areas of digital marketing, they may need active guidance to ensure that their outputs remain consistent with your project’s objectives.
Maximizing the business impacts of your designers almost certainly depends on your management skills. If you aren’t a designer yourself, this can sometimes be a tall order because web design professionals are developed in contexts that you might not yet understand. Here are some things you need to be aware of when you’re managing web designers and other digital creatives:
1. They Value Their Creative Freedom
Creative professionals get into their careers because they enjoy making things. No one enters a web design career because they like following restrictive briefs and making other people richer. If they did, they would probably be doing something else.
Of course, most professional web designers aren’t naive enough to think that their career choice doesn’t come with compromises. However, if you want a design team that’s always willing to do their best, you must be prepared to make a few compromises yourself.
In particular, you must resist the urge to micromanage designers, particularly in areas that are not covered by agreed-upon guidelines. If you find yourself constantly writing five paragraph emails asking your designers to alter what are basically inconsequential details, do everyone a favor and stop. Instead, take on an approach that guides rather than control. Not only will you maintain a better relationship with your designers, you will also be rewarded with better-performing web elements.
2. Each One Has Their Own Preferred Style
Web designers, like all creatives, have unique preferences that influence their work. Some may favor minimalistic designs, while others excel in vibrant, intricate layouts. Respecting these preferences will help you assign the right projects to the right designers, playing to each one’s strengths and avoiding pointless revision cycles.
Of course, this also means that you have to help them adapt their style to fit the brand’s guidelines and project requirements. Knowing this, it’s your responsibility to learn more about your designers’ processes and to help guide them towards results that are in line with your business’s objectives.
3. You May Need to Guide Them in Building an Efficient Workflow
Web design projects tend to involve multiple stages and collaboration with very diverse stakeholders. Not all web designers possess strong project management skills, so your guidance is crucial for any complex undertaking.
Help them establish clear milestones and deadlines, to spur them into developing a more efficient internal process. Encourage them to project management tools and offer techniques that you’ve personally tried to further streamline the design process. Providing this structure should help guarantee accountability and help them hit all their necessary deadlines.
4. Your Feedback Has to Be Constructive and Impersonal
Being schooled on things you are already knowledgeable in by someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about is always unpleasant. Web designers, like all creatives, are intimately familiar with this, and the long-time pros are no doubt used to it.
Regardless, to avoid injecting negative emotions into the feedback process you should be as specific and professional as possible. For instance, rather than simply saying “This design is unacceptable,” you may want to point out, “The color scheme doesn’t align with our brand guidelines; could we use the color we agreed on in the brief?”.
You also want to avoid language that may be interpreted as a personal attack, since this may obscure the intent of your feedback. Some hurt feelings cannot be avoided but you must do your best to ensure that the creative professionals you depend on remain open to feedback and revisions.
5. You Probably Can’t Replace Them with AI
Unless you’re a designer yourself, current generative AI tools have relatively limited utility. As thousands of businesses realized over the past couple of years, the ability of generative AI tools to completely replace humans has been somewhat oversold. Sure, you can use them for generating generic visual assets or even simple websites. But to produce anything competitive with these tools, a lot of very specific human inputs are needed.
It’s now an open secret that most of the impressive AI-generated visuals we’ve seen recently are not the results of just a few prompts but are, in fact, refined with substantial human effort. In any case, more people online have become sensitive to visual elements that are “obviously” AI-generated, with some having a particularly strong aversion to them.
Even with ever-increasing pools of data to draw from, the unrefined output of AI engines is now easily spotted and, frankly, looks a bit outdated. We may have to wait for quantum computing or some other innovation to become mainstream before we can truly replace humans in marketing campaigns that target other humans.
Read: Will AI Ever Produce a Good Website?
Bridging the Gap Between Management and Web Design
A great cook can do a lot with inferior ingredients. However, someone who doesn’t know their way around the kitchen is only going to waste whatever is in there. In much the same way, effectively managing web designers requires a deep appreciation of their capabilities and what it took for them to become as skilled as they are. Once you’ve developed this sensitivity, you’ll be well placed to harness their full potential into cohesive digital marketing campaigns.
