Creative Development

Whatever you’ve hired us to produce, the creative process happens the same way.

Magic.

Once the magic happens (you thought we were kidding?), we’ll present you with three different ideas for how the website or billboards or enrollment pubs might look. Why three? It’s a magic number.

Here’s how it works. During intake, we try to get the clearest possible sense of what makes your institution unique and why the audiences you’re trying to reach might be inclined to respond to you. But we can only infer so much from a couple of weeks of meetings and document review. So we create three different interpretations of the messages and brand markers we agreed on during strategy. Then, through focus groups and, often, an online survey, we let your current and prospective students, alumni, and other stakeholders tell us which interpretation comes closest to getting you right.

Based on the feedback from the focus groups and survey, we’ll recommend the concept we think you should choose and how, if at all, to modify it.

Once you’ve chosen a concept, creative production begins. For ads or print publications, we typically write copy and lay out the full suite of marketing collateral. For web and mobile sites, we design page templates for the various kinds of content the site will need to support and write the top 25-50 pages of the site. For both, it often means supervising photo or video shoots and interviewing students, faculty, and alumni for profiles.