Turning your creatives into a modular production process

Introduction

The creative process is mysterious, unpredictable and unique every time. Mysterious and unpredictable problems that require original solutions tend to be resource consuming and aren’t friendly to deadlines. Lucky for us in the e-commerce world, while design problems may require creative solutions, they don’t have to be resource intensive and can very much work within the confines of deadlines. 

We’ll break down the typical onboarding process we take our clients through when establishing a modular design system, so the visual creation process can be a predictable and straightforward process. 

Finding patterns

Before setting a modular design system on top of which you’ll be building your layouts and styles, we must first establish some patterns based on past work. While looking for patterns, we will also define our variables. Variables are elements that appear in most every visual. Elements are things like the main product that being advertised, the main headline that is describing the deal, a call to action that encourages your audience to act on the deal being presented. In other words, we are looking at past campaigns as a collection of the same elements, that are constantly being re-arranged. We are specifically avoiding the notion that each visual is unique and has nothing to do with other visuals. 

Let’s look at some common signs of patterns

Looking at many visuals side by side will quickly reveal obvious patterns.

Most, if not all, of your visuals:

• Will have a single main product that is being advertised.
• Will have one main headline that briefly describes the main product that is being advertised.
• Will have a deal description of some form.
• Will accommodate a few different sizes, whether they are all one proportion or many different proportions. And aside from rare exceptions, sizes similar proportions will most always share identical visual composition. 

A lot of your visuals:

• May have a spokesperson or a celebrity endorsing the product being advertised.
• May have one consistent background image or a set of consistent images being used.
• May have some form of a call to action to encourage your audience to take next steps. 
  

Some of the visuals 

• Are part of a regular annual campaign that repeats year after year. Such campaigns may have a themed frame or other repeating design elements.
• Are part of a unique or limited product offering
  
  

Using patterns to create branded layouts

By this point, some strong and some not so strong design patterns should become visible and you can start building design skeletons that can accommodate most visual requests. Some ways these layouts can be organized could be:

By single proportion

• Thumbnails
• Lorikeets
• Model photography (guided cropping)

Multi proportion

• Display campaigns
• Marketplace campaigns
• House ads

Establishing an asset library

Repeating assets like branded decorative elements, campaign elements that are constantly being re-used can be grouped together in your asset library. These could include:

• Discount sticker (20% off, 30% off, 40% off, etc.)
• CTA buttons (Shop now, Buy now, Get deal, etc.)
• Decorative frames ( for different campaign events, product types, offers, etc.)

Setting up brand guidelines

In addition to the above, one simple way of ensuring visual consistency and cohesion between campaigns is by setting up one unified styleguide. Using the same colors and fonts consistently is one of the most effective techniques for establishing a strong brand presence.  

Summary

Establishing visual consistency is key to establishing a strong brand presence. Visual consistency can happen through a variety of techniques including:

• Using consistent photography angles, lighting and cropping
• Using consistent colors and fonts
• Using consistent layouts and language
• Re-using repeating elements between campaigns
• Establishing a consistent campaign pattern (week over week, month over month, year over year)

Once the creative language and layout skeletons have been established, the next thing is inputting content. And this part is very much straight-forward and can largely be automated.