HOW magazine’s In-HOWse Design Awards issue arrived last month and I was excited to see what’s been happening in other corporate design departments. The award competitions initiated by publications such as HOW and GDUSA that specifically showcase in-house work are evidence that there is a growing interest in what this segment of the design community is creating. These awards honor some great design talent that has been traditionally overlooked and even dismissed. They also address the challenges in-house designers face, some of which I would like to examine further.

As a creative director for a national real estate company, I have a responsibility to uphold corporate design standards and consistent branding messaging for consumers throughout the New England region. The national headquarters and its ad agency dictate our brand’s image, but we still have a little room to customize pieces for our regional markets. To some degree, I need to “police” printed materials created by marketing coordinators in several local offices to make sure they conform to the brand…not an easy task. But, just the idea having to conform illustrates my challenge. How do I keep my design staff inspired when we need to primarily stay “in the box”? How do I personally stay in the game?

I keep reminding my staff and myself that we only have one client and the very nature of our job is to support that client and its associates (the company that pays our salary). We have some creative flexibility with a few choice projects like corporate event invitations, logo designs and new development brochures, but our primary responsibilities are to pump out large volumes of pre-designed or template-based marketing materials. Hey, at least we get to design the templates! When we do get a custom design assignment, we usually provide three comps for client approval. I’ll say to the designers “let’s give them two ideas that stick with the formula and one that is just ‘out there’…whatever you want to do”. I try to inspire them to create something crazy that will at least get the client’s attention and maybe help them consider choosing a design that takes some chances. This allows the designers to stretch a little and also helps the client see that the company’s own design staff is capable of much more than just average work. It seems that our best designs are the ones that never get approved, but on several occasions we are able to persuade the client to take a risk and a really cool design actually gets printed. That’s enough to keep us all going.

Another challenge is to convince our “non-designer” colleagues that the department is not just an “arts and crafts” shop where all the fun people hang out. Our design staff was recognized three years in a row by winning in several categories of the GDUSA American Inhouse Awards. These accomplishments did not go unnoticed by our top management, who honored us with national press releases and local recognition. I am very thankful that these types of competitions are growing in popularity because they give in-house designers a chance to compete in their own arena. Winners are rewarded with a sense of legitimacy and well-deserved respect from their coworkers and the design community as a whole. The ability to quantify the success of a design can be obscured in some of the broader competitions that tend to focus primarily on cutting-edge visuals or clever advertising concepts. In-house design competitions also help acknowledge the utilitarian nature of the work submitted. In most cases, in-house design solutions tend to focus on specific objectives such as getting X many of people to an event, selling X number of products or generating X amount of cash-flow in any given month. With designers and clients under the same roof, the numbers from a local advertising initiative can be more closely monitored and the results of a campaign can be more accurately measured. I don’t know how they do it, but I hear the results. Our ads either make the guys upstairs happy or they fail, no matter how cool the fonts look.

Budget and time constraints will always challenge the in-house designer but should never be a restriction. Our company does not want to pay for professional custom photography or 10-color print jobs. However, we have been able to create some great work and even a few award winners by using carefully chosen royalty-free photos or by drawing our own freehand illustrations. We are accustomed to working fast, but our team has developed a thorough approval system that assures design standards will be maintained and deadlines will be met. We work together with what we have and are still able to create designs that we can be proud of.

This year’s In-HOWse Design Awards presented a very impressive selection of winning designs, although I would have liked to see more (it was an inaugural issue, so maybe next year?). A few pieces that stand out to me are “Monkey Business Ice Cream” (p. 57) with those hilarious looking apes and funky type treatments; the “Cruise Travel Kit” (p. 65) for its blend of classic and contemporary design motif’s (I just want to touch it and keep it with me); and the “Cocktail Party Invitation” (p.68) oddly enough for it’s spontaneous and homespun look… always a winner in the corporate environment. These projects moved me primarily because they are fun and especially because they survived the corporate gauntlet of approval and made it into public view. Congratulations to the design teams that did not settle for merely adequate work.

These and other winning designs should inspire us in-house designers to create more “agency level work” as we call it. We need to understand the various kinds of design solutions that are possible and acceptable in a corporate setting and realize that nothing should hold us back from creating “award winning” designs… even if we don’t win an award.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Design Careers, Graphic Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.