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When you engage in a new client project how do you get started? A solid process plays a critical role in the project’s overall success, yet this process is one of the deepest darkest secrets of our industry. Evolving from print, identity, and advertising the web retains many methodologies and deliverable relics from disciplines that produce very different products. When we supply detailed mockups that represent set widths, we can imply that we’re executing the final design. Clients can feel disconnected from the process, which gives them a false sense of completion, detaching them from the final product. So why don’t we more closely design our own process to work within clients’ expectations and emotions? We must evolve our deliverables to make clients a more active participant in the process.

Emotional connection

Style tiles are a flexible starting point that define a style to communicate the web in a way that clients understand. A style tile is more refined than a traditional identity mood board and less detailed than a website mockup or comp. When an interior designer redesigns a room they don’t build multiple options of the designs they’re proposing, they bring color swatches, paint chips, and architectural drawings. Style tiles act as paint chips and color swatches for the interface that we can execute on any device or at any dimension. It’s a truly responsive solution to visual design.

A mood board can provide a great jumping-off point for client discussion, but is often too vague to help clients make a clear leap from discussion to website. Mood boards are a good way to dig deep into a brand identity, but when it comes to bringing the identity to a complex web system, such a weak connection can make it hard for a client to understand and imagine the outcome. By contrast, style tiles make a great visual design artifact. They help a designer communicate how they will apply the styles across a larger web system, which includes desktop and mobile experiences.

Ask questions to extract adjectives

The style tile process teases out the passion behind a brand, revealing nuggets of descriptive goodness all while connecting the client to the project. The first step in the style tile process is to question the stakeholders. You can use a survey or ask the questions in a design kickoff meeting. First, be sure to have the stakeholders list and rate their goals for the site’s visuals. Having them define their goals up front reinforces the priority of each style decision throughout the process. Next, ask questions that will encourage adjective-rich answers in your survey. Metaphor questions like the ones described in this Adaptive Path article are strategic and help break the ice. For example: “If your website was a vehicle, what vehicle would it be and why?”. This is a great question: there are social and cultural perceptions that surround different automobile brands and types of transportation. The adjectives associated with these brands may be very different. Your client will describe a Toyota Prius differently than an SUV.

Semantic differential survey questions are a really good way to understand the client’s aesthetic preferences. You can set up word pairs that are opposite of one another and ask clients to select a point on the scale between the two to help describe the way they envision the site. Do they envision the site as modern or old-fashioned, or somewhere in between? These questions help rate how closely the stakeholder relates to a word that describes the site’s potential style. Illustrative, photographic, and typographic are all words that a stakeholder can rate to help you get a sense for their preferences. Often I’ll pair an example site with each word so that the stakeholder can see the relationship. MailChimp is an example of “illustrative” while NPR is an example of “typographic.”

Once your stakeholders have filled out your survey or answered your questions during a kick-off meeting, analyze what they’ve given you. Study their answers and highlight adjectives to compile a list. Have some adjectives been used more frequently? Those words go to the top of your list. Themes will begin to emerge, and from this you can start to formulate an online brand vision. This can be a short statement that sums up your findings, or it might state that all of the stakeholders are in disagreement. Whether the online brand vision is clear or disjointed, it provides you with a jumping off point to discuss how to move forward with your client as you present the tiles.

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