Since design is a creative process, designers generally don’t follow a list of steps in a strictly linear fashion. They go back and forth from stage to stage until the end product looks right. Nevertheless, having a general guideline gives designers a place to start even if they don’t follow it exactly.

Summarizing the Goal of the Project
The first thing you want to do is know where you want to end up. This will help you to make design decisions related to color, form, image, and basically everything else. For example, if you are designing and printing a poster for a rock band, your goal might be to excite young adults. Once you’ve summarized this goal, you can make decisions about what to put in your poster.

Researching Materials
Get together all the materials you can find related to your project because this gives the creative part of your brain something to build on. Ask your client for any materials they might have. So if you were designing a poster for a rock band, you might ask for cd’s and their cover, t-shirts, and anything else they might have. Then you would look up posters of bands in the same general genre along with their album covers, t-shirts, and everything you can find. After looking at everything, choose a few items that you think are really good and use elements of those to start creating your own sketches.

Decide on the Style
Think about your audience and the message you want to convey and establish the general style of the piece. Also think about icon forms that people readily associate with the type of project you are working on. This is where you choose colors and fonts. Remember that colors convey messages almost as much as print and images. Using the poster type we’ve started with as an example, you would probably want to choose edgier colors like black, charcoals, and reds to attract the rock crowd.

Creating Sketches
Just like when you were in English Composition and your teacher told you to just put your thoughts on paper without thinking about grammar and punctuation, your first sketches should just flow out of you without critique. Just get all your ideas on paper. After the first attempt, choose the best elements of your sketches and make a few more refined versions.

Getting Your Ideas into Digital Form
Then you can put your sketches on the computer. Use whichever program you are most comfortable with to design. Refine your sketches once again and choose a final product. Then refine the product; for this stage, Photoshop or a similar design program usually works best.

Present Your Mockups to the Client
For this stage, it’s up to you whether or not you show the client a physical version or a digital one. The physical copy obviously requires more work, but it’s the only way to show the client what it will really look like. Again with the poster example, there is really no way to give the full effect of a poster on a computer screen. On the other hand, if you are designing a web page, showing the digital design makes the most sense.

After showing the client your work, you will most likely have to make some adjustments and revisit a few of the above stages. Like what was said above, being creative is messy and doesn’t usually fit into a precise formula, but that’s part of the fun.