Design Project Planning Step by Step: How to Plan the Work and Avoid Creative Chaos

0:00I think about brand strategy like a cattle shoot brand strategy and design strategy the reason why it exists is in order to take the subjectivity out of the creative evaluation process you need it in order to develop the creative in a really targeted way having brand strategy in place before you start any kind of a creative project is going to make that creative project easier for you and more effective for the client and is going to make the entire process a lot smoother because it takes the subjectivity of evaluating the creative work and makes it much more objective because you're making decisions based on strategy and what needs to be accomplished by the work it takes it out of the purely aesthetic sphere of like what I like what I don't like if you don't have brand strategy presenting creative is literally just a beauty pageant and it comes down to what the client likes and you can't have any say in that but if there is something that's more objective and less subjective by instituting brand strategy

1:00into the process you win. Welcome to the brand design master's podcast the show dedicated to helping you build the skills you need to design bullet proof brand for yourself your business and the clients and customers you serve and now here's Philip. The following podcast comes from a live stream I did recently many of you have requested that I make my live streams available as audio so you can listen to them on the go. So I am now republishing some of my most popular live streams is podcast make that possible as always if you like this episode please take a moment to provide a star rating review on your favorite podcast listening platform or better yet share the episode on social or with a friend or a colleague and with that let's jump into the episode. So what we're going to be talking about is developing and planning a design projects it's very tactical and it's super important for anyone who's a creative professional design project planning step by step and the headline from today is that you got to plan the work.

2:14It's very easy when you're a creative kind of want to jump in and do the design and get going get paid your deposit and jump off the diving board but putting some rigor and some planning and some process into establishing the project roadmap is time super well spent and so you want to plan the work and then work your plan we're going to be walking through six key stages in what it takes to design a project plan so stage number one is engagement and preparation that's where you start off and we have our discovery calls etc number two is project architecture or actually when you're developing the project plan number three is kick off and brand foundation number four is the creative brief number five is the actual creative development and number six is the final delivery and even more importantly follow up that can lead to more work and I'm going to share more about that when we get to that point. I do understand how to plan the project but you also have to know how to participate in it and that is just as an important equal part of the process and I am talking today about what you need to plan for which you need to build into your proposals and into your project plans

3:28and also what you don't need to keep it simple to leap it refined and tight and concise so everyone can move through the process with minimal chaos and minimal headaches right so that's what we want is creatives we want minimal headaches minimal scope creep we want the fewest rounds of revisions and creative reviews that we can and that's what we're going to be talking about today to try to keep things running like a well oiled machine so who is today for today's for creative professionals of course agency side small agency big agency freelancers consultants but also the client side so the companies the entrepreneurs the people who want creative work done for their company both can benefit from what I'm going to present to you today because it takes two sides takes two sides of the street to make a really successful design project and to understand each of our roles as we go through that project and the reason why is because if a project fails it will be because of what happened before design even started in my experience

4:34if you do great scoping great proposals good design strategy then all of the rest of it all of that design goes very very smoothly you have to create some structure and some guard rails around this process and doing design project planning up front is going to make the results of that the possibilities of that happening much higher percentage of chances of it actually being painless less chaotic and more fun to do let's talk a little bit about just for a second around why projects have a tendency to fail and let me know whether you identify with this at all if you've ever had a project fail because of one of these things one of the reasons is lack of strategic planning or having any kind of brand strategy for the company that you're working with with it could be unclear scope or what happens a lot of times is scope creep so you start off with one scope for the project but it morphs and it changes and more stakeholders get involved and suddenly the scope is creeping into something else. Another reason project fail are unclear objectives or an incomplete or unclear project plan there could be no guard rails for how you're going to be evaluating the creative that's in the project there could be misalignment amongst the stakeholders on the client side on the agency side and also one of the most important things is the success criteria how do you judge the work and how do you judge that the project has been a success

6:01those are just a few of the reasons why projects have a tendency to fail so let's jump into the stages of design project planning okay stage number one is engagement and preparation and this is you'll see a bit of a larger phase because there's a lot of moving parts and the thing I want you to keep in mind about this is that if you scope project wrong everything that follows is going to be damage control and I know that's kind of hyperbolic but it's true if you plan a project really well it can run like a super well oil machine and you're going to have less chaos and less heartache all the way around on both sides of the table and so the first phase of this is the discovery call qualifying the client and up sell and so the activities are involved in this are qualifying the prospect so are they capable of paying the sorts of fees or the rates that you charge is the scope appropriate for what you do the project goals the methods and also is there a client agency fit some of this is vibe right you have to pay attention to whether this feels good or not

7:08and so you want to make sure not only is a project right for you the fees are aligned but also that you think that you're going to be able to work well with a client if you get red flags at the beginning it's always good to walk away if you're able to do that walking away can always be a really good thing if it doesn't feel like a good fit and an added bonus to this discovery call and qualification phase is the ability to up sell to sell in more than the client originally may have come to you for and I'm going to talk about that just a little bit the discovery call includes a number of things this is just a little bit of the detail what you want to do in a discovery calls you want to gather and understand as much information about the company that you can you want to gather background information on the company what are their products what are their services who's their customer avatar do they have any brand strategy as any kind of marketing strategy been done have they ever had it done and if they haven't that can be a huge opportunity for you if that's something that you're able to develop for them

8:09also the other thing is if they don't have that if they don't have any understanding of their brand their marketing strategy that can be a bit of a red flag if you're jumping into a creative project because that should really be the underpinning for everything that you do what is their brand ecosystem do they have brand guidelines do they have marketing assets do they have a business plan what do they have in terms of business and brand assets you're going to be able to draw from and are going to help educate you at the beginning of the process what's their understanding of the competition this is a really important one and one of the biggest opportunities for you I am always shocked by small to medium sized businesses in how little they truly understand their competition and where they sit in the competitive landscape a lot of companies think that they're out there by themselves or they may have an understanding of their one competitor who's biting at their heels or the one competitor that they're chasing but it's a much larger landscape than that and if the company doesn't really have an understanding of who their competition is that's very important for you because that's a great opportunity for you to sell in a competitive audit or some sort of insights around the marketplace

9:20and it's also a bit of a red flag if they don't really understand their competition that's going to make it harder for you because you're going to have to do some research into that before you launch into your creative project there are the project goals they're going to come to you with some understanding of what it is that they want right this is what we want but as you go through this process of discovery and ask all these questions and really dig into their business and start to understand what they know what they don't know what they have what they don't have you may actually discovered that what they say they want is not what they actually need they may say look we want a new website and when you dig into it you might find that they need a better funnel driving people to that website or maybe they need a better customer journey on the website they have there's all sorts of things that a client may think that they need one particular thing and once you dive in into some diagnostics it might turn out that they need something slightly different or even better yet something more which again could give you some opportunities to sell in additional things the last thing in the discovery call that you should really go into is your capabilities

10:27and the reason why I suggest that people leave it to the end is because if you're taking into getting some background on the company and understanding what it is that they want and you're getting a better understanding of what it is that they need when it comes to your discussing and presenting and pitching your capabilities you can tailor that message to exactly what their expectations are so you can to a certain extent frame your capability set around what it is that they need so you sound like and look like the perfect answer for them so that's some of the pieces that go into a discovery call the next stage that we get into is what I like to call the ballpark quote instead of going right from the discovery concept developing a fully fledged proposal which sometimes can take hours and hours of time to develop I always find it best to come to some alignment around fees before you do that you can either do that in the discovery call itself or you can go offline think about it and send them an email with a suggested scope and ballpark fees around that scope

11:31and then get alignment to that ballpark quote either through email or you could present them those ideas on a subsequent call but you want to get a high level agreement the gentleman's and shake agreement to their understanding what your fees are and they're accepting of those fees the reason why do that is because it takes a tremendous amount of time to develop a proposal and you want to get some alignment before you actually spend the time to do that you don't want to waste your time or theirs if there is a drastic misalignment in understanding of fees that are going to be involved in the project and then after the project quote is accepted that's where you start to narrow down and tighten up the actual scope of the project and move into the project proposal the project proposal includes things like a high level project plan objectives of the project some activities of the project deliverables fees timing in the contract the agency introduction an introduction of your credentials that might be a small beauty show of some of your creative work and an introduction of your team a intro letter at the beginning of the proposal that's laying out and presenting the proposal to them the objectives of the project so what are they looking to accomplish through this project

12:45and then the big piece of the proposal are the phases of work generally I break out phases into individual page for each phase there's a discovery page stakeholder interviews competitive audit design brand guidelines all those levels of deliverables that you're going to have for your client I break those into separate pages or phases inside each of those phases you're going to describe the phase and its objective the activities involved in that phase the reviews how many reviews how many presentations there are the expected number of revisions what the actual deliverable is what is the thing they get out of that phase as well as fees per phase and an estimated timeline or a time duration for each phase as well and then towards the end of the proposal you get into the project calendar you have a fees page where you break out the fees by phase and then also have a total for those fees generally have a signature line on that page as well and then finally you move into your terms and conditions contract which should be in your proposal as well and they should also have a signature line on that as well so after signature pages on the proposal on the contract

13:56you want to have a page at the end that kind of tells them what's next you can either do that in the email that you send the proposal with or you can actually put it in the proposal itself now some people like to present proposals on zoom or in real life rather than just sending it out to the client because it gives you an opportunity to really answer questions and get into it and start to establish that level of intimacy and relationship with the client. And then you want to make sure in every single project that you do you have a terms and conditions contract that can be just if it's a small project it can be as little as a paragraph but you want to lay out what the terms of the agreement are kill fees deposit amounts balance amounts when things are paid stage number two is project architecture or the actual project plan after the contract is signed what's next the next step is you want to create a design. Now the thing to understand about project plans is that project plans and mostly project calendars are always living documents.

15:01I don't know I've ever been involved in a project where the calendar didn't change a little bit somewhere and very often the project plan itself can change or phases can be dropped you kind of have to be ready for the fact that sometimes stuff changes particularly calendars best laid plans and mice and men in a design project. And the project is to kind of think that calendar is going to go exactly the way it was mapped in the beginning as a creative entrepreneur I know from personal experience it can feel isolating to go it alone. So I want you to take a second and imagine being surrounded by other accomplished creatives who are just as eager to accelerate the growth of their businesses and personal brands as you are. And if you've been following me for any length of time you know I'm a huge advocate of mastermind groups and what they can do for you both personally and professionally. And because of that I wanted to let you know I've launched a mastermind membership community called bonfire for creative professionals bonfire is a hybrid group coaching training networking and accountability community is a place for you to make meaningful industry connections and build knowledge so you can really achieve your full potential.

16:15The best part about it is that you aren't alone anymore when you join literally overnight you're part of a group of people who would do everything they can to help you succeed and build a level of confidence in what you're doing that you've never felt before. In bonfire you get by weekly video coaching sessions a private online community a deep resource library of downloads templates tools and tutorials and you also get exclusive access to me as a mentor and a coach. So I want you to come check out bonfire just go to filipvanducin.com slash bonfire and learn more about it again that's filipvanducin.com slash bonfire B-O-N-F-I-R-E. I hope to see you beside the bonfire very soon. So there are kind of six key parts to a project plan what is a project plan a project plan is basically a holding document it can be for you and just used internally or you can actually share it with the client and co-create it to make sure that all of this stuff is captured in the same place.

17:26But for our tents and purposes I'm going to be talking about it in terms of what are the six key parts of a project plan to be used internally. And the first part is the what so that is what's the scope of work what are the phases what are the deliverables now yes some of this is included in the proposal. The proposal but there are aspects of this when you pull all of this together that are not actually in the proposal so having a project plan can be very helpful because it's aggregating all of that information and it's kind of a holding document for the whole project and then number two is the when. So that's the timeline calendar the milestones what I like to call the decision matrix I use the the acronym or the methodology that's RACI or AC which is who's responsible who's accountable who's consulted and who's informed of a decision if project is with a larger company with a lot of stakeholders that's very important to understand who's included in watch meeting who has a decision making rights who's just there to be informed by it.

18:31Establishing and codifying that is a smart idea to do in a project plan and those critical milestones and how the phases are going to work and overlap with each other one of the tools I'd like to use with project plans for design are Gantt charts and if you're not familiar with what a Gantt chart is it's essentially a project plan calendar but it shows phases of work reviews timeline around what you're doing what the clients doing when the presentations are because often phases don't butt up against each other. Just one stops and one begins often they overlap each other and Gantt charts are a great tool to make that very visual for us so it's easier to follow Google Docs has a lot of great Gantt chart template so you don't have to do it from scratch and there's also a whole lot of apps that make them too. The third part is the who so who are the team members both on the client side and the agency side who's the agency team who's the client team who are any additional stakeholders you want to capture that in the project plan number four is how how are things going to get done what are the communication pathways so who communicates with who when and what's the cadence of that what are the work plans where the phases of work what are the platforms you're going to be using.

19:47You're realizing to do that work all of that how information is captured in the project plan the fifth part of the project plan is foundation foundation is where you collect all the brand assets it could be marketing data user data user research. If they have any competitive research resources understanding any outside contributor interdependencies maybe they have outside agencies that you have to interface with. Understanding the entire brand foundation is an aspect of what goes into the project plan and then number six is infrastructure capturing infrastructure and how things are going to get done and on what platforms the kind of technical and tactical aspects of that is important to capture in a project plan what applications that are going to be used is there any kind of project management software that's going to be used project management software like Monday or click up or pipe drive there's any number of project management applications that can be used. Just internally or actually shared with the client to process work and do approvals and comments and all that sort of stuff you have to decide on file sharing you might want to establish a CRM that kind of infrastructure is a good aspect to capture in a project plan as well.

21:01Stage number three is the project kickoff in the brand foundation the project kickoff is a kickoff call with the client and this is when the project starts up so you want to review that project plan if you are indeed going to share with the client or you just reconfirm the proposal and understand the phases of the work in the calendar etc. This is essentially a call or a meeting that's meant to onboard all the stakeholders to the fact that the project is starting what their roles are going to be and how it's going to progress. You want to talk about that decision making matrix the racey so who's responsible who's accountable who's consulted who's informed through the decision making process. You want to talk about how communication is going to go some clients love phone calls some like email some like project management software what is that communication going to look like. What is the approval chain going to be you want to understand when you're presenting work in a creative project are all the stakeholders the final decision makers in that meeting or are they going to then have to shop it through their organization and get higher levels of approvals understanding that chain and identifying that in a kickoff meeting can be really helpful just so everyone is on board with exactly what's going to be happening that's one of the places where creative projects can go really wrong.

22:19And then finally you just want to review the calendar and go over that and make sure that everyone's on board with what the plan of the calendar is because it may shift and if does you want to be joining on the spot with that and communicate with the client so that doesn't come bouncing back at you. Alright and then the project starts and when the project starts the first thing that you want to do is get into the brand foundation that's gathering from the client any brand documentation do they have style guides do they have marketing plans do they have business plans do they have campaigns that other agencies did that information that you're going to need to know to make sure that you are completely informed about their entire brand landscape so all the creative work that you do aligns with that. This phase of the brand foundation or research also is where stakeholder interviews might happen so you might be interviewing the stakeholders within the client organization or you could possibly even be doing customer interviews to understand the customer experience.

23:19This is also where if they have any competitive audit information or understanding of the competitive landscape that they would provide that to you or you would be doing that at this stage of the game you would be starting to do a competitive audit for them to help inform the world. And then consumer insights research research is one of those things that actually can happen in a number of different stages of any creative project depending on the scale of the company research can happen before project even starts to inform the work it can happen in the middle of the project to evaluate the work it can happen at the end of the project to evaluate the work or whether it's going to work in the marketplace. Depending on the scale of the client that you're working with and depending on budgets etc and what is known or not known research can happen any number of places in a design project so I can't get too specific around that but understanding the research that they may have or if they want to do any research around the project this is where that becomes part of the conversation. And then this is also where brand strategy is done if the company has brand strategy information you want to make sure that they provide that to you if they don't that's a huge opportunity for you because having brand strategy can drive and make more targeted and more effective and more successful any kind of creative project done for a company.

24:37If you have experience developing brand strategy that's great if you can get contracted to develop brand strategy for your client that's even better. And if you are a creative professional and you've never done brand strategy or you don't have a clear understanding of it I actually have a course called brand strategy 101 which is a foundational signature course that can get you up to speed on brand strategy very quickly and show you exactly how to integrate that into the sort of business that you have. So if you're interested in learning more about brand strategy you go to filipvanducin.com slash B S 101 and you can read about my brand strategy course and enrolling it from that page. I think about brand strategy like a cattle shoot brand strategy and design strategy the reason why it exists is in order to take the subjectivity out of the creative evaluation process you need it in order to develop the creative in a really targeted way having brand strategy in place. This before you start any kind of a creative project is going to make that creative project easier for you and more effective for the client and it's going to make the entire process a lot smoother because it takes this subjectivity of evaluating the creative work and makes it much more objective because you're making decisions based on strategy and what needs to be accomplished by the work it takes it out of the purely aesthetic sphere of like what I like what I don't like.

26:02If you don't have brand strategy presenting creative is literally just a beauty pageant and it comes down to what the client likes and you can't have any say in that. But if there is something that's more objective and less subjective by instituting brand strategy into the process you win highly recommend either learning brand strategy or making sure that you present your creative work in a very strategic way stage four is the creative brief. The creative brief is a designer's best friend you have to think of it like a second contract now creative briefs are fantastic they are essentially in abbreviated encapsulated overview of the project as it's going to inform design or creative and it's where business strategy and creative strategy intersect to inform designer creative it literally will define what success for the project looks like it anchors every single creative presentation. In design strategy and again removes that subjectivity of what the client likes or doesn't like and moves it into a world of objectivity whether it's on brand on strategy or not it makes design critiques and design decisions so much easier and falls into that realm of you got to move the client down the cattle shoot.

27:19So they end up coming out the other end at the design that's best for the business and also the design that you want them to choose now who creates the creative brief with larger enterprise companies the creative brief is usually created by the client company and it's provided to the agency and if you've ever worked in the agency world there's an agency trope around the idea of the bad creative brief we all know and have received a bad creative briefs from the client. And generally when that happens the agency goes back and they kind of rewrite the brief or go and interview the client and get all the answers to the questions that they need and their creative brief gets revised and co-created until the agency is happy with it and then that creative brief is used to judge and drive the creative project now creative briefs are a step in this sort of project that unless you're working with a larger enterprise client or you're in a larger agency a lot times the creative brief step is skipped. But if you're a smaller freelancer individual contributor and you've never worked with a creative brief it's a good idea to kind of start to get your head around it because it can be a very handy tool even if you only use it internally to help guide you in the process.

28:31I've also known people who actually develop a creative brief and share it with the client and use it as a springboard every presentation that they do because it helps ground the conversation and strategy and takes it again out of that beauty page and vibe so what's in a creative brief. There's a number of things that are in the proposal and in the project plan that are captured in the creative brief but the idea is that the brief simplifies it and translates it into a way that creatives can understand and creative is can act upon and so the project description is in there the brand product service that's actually being affected by the project what's the mission of that brand. What are the business objectives for the project what must that design or piece of creative actually achieve what's the context of the project or what are the insights involved in the project that could be who's the consumer target. What's the competitive landscape look like what are the market category insights also included in the creative brief is that design or brand design toolkit and that's any kind of visual brand equities that already exist that have to be taken a consideration in the project for instance if you're designing a website and the brand has a brand logo and a color palette and guidelines you as a web designer or UX designer have to take all of those brand standards under consideration.

29:54When you produce work for them if you were doing a packaging project and they have a line of packaging that has a certain kind of architecture to them you might need to follow that architecture to an extent to do this line extension or to do this other project there may be existing brand resources or equities that have to be maintained or considered for your projects and then design strategy if you have time or if you can get paid for it developing style scapes mood boards creative anchors theme board. As a precursor to actually doing design exploration can be very helpful in focusing that design exploration so it's very tight and it's less easy to go off track if those sorts of mood boards or stylescapes are developed sometimes they are retrofitted back into the creative brief so the creative brief has all the information that I just listed but then once those mood boards brandscapes etc are developed they are injected back into the creative brief and I'll let you know what I'm talking about.

30:54I'll explain why in just a second also in the brief are any kind of requirements so that's any deliverables or mandatory is if there's communication hierarchy that has to be established or followed if there's any kind of really clear success criteria that the client has already laid out that should be captured in the creative brief any kind of logistics that's timing dates key milestones and any kind of research needs. Now that sounds like a whole tremendous amount of stuff right and it can be that's the thing and that's why this whole bad brief thing has become such a trope in the agency business because when large companies or enterprise level companies put together brief sometimes they can be 15 20 pages long and if you give that to a design group they don't know what to do with it right it just like they have no concept about how that should drive the creative work. So when I was in the agency world I developed a one page creative brief that actually has holding places for all of this information and the reason why I developed that was so I had a very simple tool that carried all the information that was pertinent to the creative project but it was on a single page that I could give to my design team and say this is what we follow and so it was simplifying the information in a very visual way and so I developed this tool and I actually offer this tool as downloadable product on my website.

32:16It's called the one page creative brief and it's 20 bucks and if you go to fill up into some calm slash products you can download the PDF right there it's got instructions on how to use it. This one page creative brief is also featured in the brand strategy 101 class and is part of that class so I decided to sell it as an independent product because it's an amazing tool and it's up to a whole lot of people so check that out if you're curious about the one page creative brief. Stage number five is when we get into creative so this is the fun part right this is what we're in this profession for the thing to remember about creative is that creative success is generally guaranteed when you have guardrails and the clear guardrails I'm talking about here is design strategy and brand strategy. Those create that cattle shoot that help act as guardrails to drive towards the most appropriate decision for the project. It takes the subjectivity and decision making and makes it more of an objective decision making process.

33:17I like to start off every meeting with a review of the creative brief with the client so it constantly reinforces the idea of what the design and brand strategy underpinnings of the project are. And the reason why I always review it just very quickly before every creative presentation is just so everyone is aligned and then when we start talking about creative we talk about it through a strategic lens. The first part of the creative process if you have time for it if there's budget for it and if you find it helpful in your creative process and that's to create some level of design strategy that's taking the business strategy the brand strategy the project objectives in translating that into. Some sort of a visual design product sometimes they're called style scapes sometimes they're called brand scapes or theme boards or mood boards or creative anchors there essentially that initial stab at establishing a design language that's going to inform the creative development process when those sorts of things are developed they simplify the design exploration because it's creating a sharper point to where that creative

34:26exploration has to start and it cuts off all of the red hearings that can cause scope creep. Once those sorts of stylescapes and things are developed putting them back into the creative brief can really be helpful so when you're jumping off and reviewing creative you're going through that brand strategy the creative strategy the marketing strategy and you're looking at those initial design strategy boards and then when you review all the creative in that meeting it's all going to be a good idea. It's all going through that lens so doing design strategy some sort of visual around that can be really helpful lots of clients don't want to pay for it but the one thing I would say is that even as an exercise doing it yourself and injecting it into your creative process can be very helpful in ensuring the success of the project. And then we get into design so that's doing the creative work all the presentations the reviews the refinements the feedback etc finally culminating in the final design and then as I mentioned earlier research could happen so sometimes user research consumer research happens after the final design is arrived at to double check whether it's going to be successful in the market.

35:37I've done a lot of work with PNG and when they do major projects for breeze or tide going to market with a design like that is a hundred of millions dollars investment so they usually do use research to make sure that it's going to be accepted and market before it actually is produced. So sometimes post design research can be done and then finally stage six is final delivery and follow up. You have to remember that delivery isn't the end it's where a lot of your leverage actually begins it's been a successful project everybody's happy and now it's time to deliver but you can also get a whole lot of traction out of this part of the process let me explain why. So you deliver the artwork you're delivering the production art maybe the working files and then there's finalization dicing on the cake they do the final balance of payment maybe there's a post more to meeting with the client to kind of review the success or how the project went and then there's follow up and the follow up is kind of a very important piece.

36:43This is after the projects over three six months down the line you might want to circle back with that client and ask them about the success of the project whether there were any key performance indicators any market metrics that were met lifts in business any more visitors to the website any more form fills whatever the indicator is of success of the sort of creative project that you did you want to always take the time to circle back to the client and hear from them how it went. A, that shows them that you're really interested B, if it was successful you're capturing information that's quantifiable and super helpful in case that is you can also gather testimonials you can use on your website you might be able at that point to get some consumer feedback so some feedback they might have received from their consumers about the creative work that you did you can also ask your clients for referrals are there any other companies or any other stakeholders in your company or divisions in your company that can come up. You could use this sort of work that we did for you are there any network connections that you have who you could possibly introduce us to going back to the client looking and asking for referrals you can't get unless you ask so going back and asking for referrals is one of those things that we can forget because we're moving on to the next project.

38:02But if you've had a successful project you want to make sure that you're creating that leverage for yourself to get more work and to continue to be successful by asking for what you need which is referrals to other companies and then you want to gather whatever information that you can from the brand for your portfolio so you can develop a case study and you can publish that case study and that can become a vehicle for getting more clients for you so this is what we covered today we covered the six. This is one of the six stages of design project planning number one engagement and preparation number two project architecture project planning number three kick off and brand foundation four is the creative brief five is creative development and six is final delivery and follow up. And I said at the beginning that I was going to share something special at the end I want to share this with you and that is that I've developed a mastermind community. It's called bonfire and if you're looking to improve your business improve your meaningful network people that you know that you could use as strategic partners in projects to add rocket fuel to your learning bonfire is an amazing vehicle to do that.

39:14If you go to Philip van Ducen dot com slash bonfire you can learn more about what a mastermind group is I have a few videos on that page of myself explaining it and also videos of people who are in bonfire or have been in bonfire and the value that they got out of it so you might want to go and check that out bonfires a hybrid group coaching and mastermind community for mid to late career creative professionals and it includes four zoom meetings a month two of them are mastermind. Sessions one is an office hour session and one is either a visiting expert or an inspiration session. You get group coaching from me all of the sessions are recorded and are available in a gated online community for you to review later if you miss a meeting or if you want to catch up or re review or re listen to something. There's an amazing resource library over a hundred downloads templates tools playlist et cetera which are literally plug and play documents a number of the documents from brand strategy one or one are in bonfire.

40:15And that you can immediately put into use in your business and my brand strategy one of one courses available inside of bonfire so if you want to start learning about brand strategy you can take that course at a 50% discount and then you're already in a coaching environment with me. So as you implement that into your business I'm there to actually help you do that and answer any questions that you have in person. And so it's a vibrant community and lots of people who are in it have been in it since it launched two years ago. So I highly recommend that you check it out. I threw a whole lot of information at you today and I know that and I went through an amazing lightning speed. But as you work through and improve your creative process and planning process in your own business really get in there and make it a practice to up your game being more successful as a creative entrepreneur. So with that thanks again and I'll see you guys later. If you'd like to help support the brand design master's podcast please rate and review us on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcast.

41:19Also if you want to stay up to date on all our content products courses and live video shows head over to PhilipVanducin.com slash muse and sign up for the brand muse newsletter. That's where we share all the latest news resources articles books and videos that we recommend to help you build and improve your creative practice personal brand and business. That's PhilipVanducin.com slash muse M-U-S-E. Thanks again for listening. Bye for now.