When you’re an in-house designer or freelancer, it can be difficult to communicate your worth to the clients and non-designers you’re surrounded by. To many outside the design community, designers exist simply to “make things pretty.” The truth, however, is that designers do much more than make things pretty. In fact, a 2018 report from Econsultancy and Adobe revealed that “organizations describing themselves as ‘design-driven’ are 69% more likely than their peers to have exceeded their 2017 business goals by a significant margin,” showing that designers play a large role in businesses achieving their goals. That impact is often overlooked, though, by non-designers, especially in in-house and freelance settings—so how can you change that?
Use language business professionals who aren’t designers will understand, not design jargon.
The previous sentence might have made you cringe if you’re not a numbers person, but stay with me. To communicate the value of design and your work as a designer, you need to consider how the work you’re doing is tied to achieving company goals, which might include generating revenue, growing customer bases, building trust with customers, and more. Many business professionals love data and graphs, so use them to your advantage to really show non-designers just how your work is impacting the bottom line. Track the impact a redesign you created had on customer conversion rates, for example, and share that information. Don’t think of it as bragging—think of it as celebrating the success of the design and the company. Track the increasing open and click rates for email marketing pieces you’ve designed. Run A/B tests comparing old designs to new ones. Gather feedback from users (conduct surveys or interviews) to reveal how the design of your company’s products and offerings makes them feel about the brand. Whenever you can, track and quantify the value you’ve added to the business you work for through your designs and present those findings to the wider company.
Using the language of business professionals with colleagues and executives who aren’t designers, rather than design jargon, shows that you have respect for them and value their work as well. It demonstrates that you’ve put in the effort to understand their perspective.
If you’re an in-house designer, take advantage of opportunities to showcase exactly what you do.
Why is it important for the non-designers at your company to understand what you do and the value it brings to the company?
- It helps keep your job secure. When executives in a company understand the value you bring to the table as a designer, they’ll be more reluctant to lay you off if staff cuts are ever made.
- It sets you up for promotions. The easiest way to stagnate in your career is to get stuck at a company where nobody understands what you do or the value of design. By educating non-designers on the importance of design, you’re in turn showing them how valuable you are as a designer and opening more doors for career movement.
As one of only a few in-house designers for a research company in Chicago, a big part of proving my value as a designer and showing what I bring to the table comes in the form of internal presentations and trainings on the value of design and design thinking, design best practices and trends, and even topics like color theory. This shows colleagues and executives that I’m knowledgeable and helps build trust and respect for what I do—I’m not just making things pretty. These internal trainings and presentations prevent quality design from appearing like a simple cocktail garnish when it’s really the whole cocktail.
I also make a point to regularly walk the non-designers on my team through my process, so that they understand more of the nitty gritty of what has gone into a design and how it contributes to achieving the larger company goals. For example, I played a large role in transitioning my team from working primarily in PowerPoint to InDesign after demonstrating the value of the tool and how it would streamline workflows and allow for more creative, trend-forward designs that echo the food trend data we’re presenting in our reports. So, business professionals who aren’t designers can see that moving to InDesign means more efficient work and an enhanced user experience of a key product.
Beyond just internal presentations and trainings, however, there are other ways to demonstrate the value of design. The key is to understand what the executives at your company pay attention to. That may mean demonstrating the value of design through a coffee table book they can flip through at their leisure. It may mean assembling an interactive video showcasing the importance of design and the value of your work and playing it at a meeting where there’s an opportunity for Q&A afterwards. Depending on who your audience is, the medium for communicating the value of design and your work as a designer may be different.
Leverage case studies and show executives how other successful companies have relied on design to help them get where they are.
If you know of businesses that the executives at your company admire, use those businesses as case studies to demonstrate how success was achieved by valuing design. For a case study on how a company went from a struggling startup to a billion-dollar business, look no further than Airbnb. First Round Review reports that in 2009 “Airbnb was close to going bust.” When the founders sought out a reason for the company’s stagnation, they noticed a pattern in the listings on Airbnb: the photos were awful. Many were taken on cell phones and didn’t truly reveal to people what they’d be getting if they booked a home or room with Airbnb. The solve for this problem? Someone on behalf of Airbnb went to New York, rented a camera, and took higher resolution photos of the rental spaces to replace the terrible low-resolution photos originally in the listings. A week later, it was evident that upgrading the quality of the imagery had had a massive impact—the company’s weekly revenue soon doubled.
Compare your designs to competitors’ designs to show how you’re helping the company stand out in the crowd.
Benchmarking designs you created against a competitor’s can be key to demonstrating the value you’re bringing to a business as their designer. Compare a design you created to one a competitor created in an internal meeting or lunch and learn. Walk colleagues and executives through what makes your design stand out, how it enhances the user experience, and is leaving a positive impression of the company’s brand. Alternatively, you can also use the comparison to a competitor’s design to demonstrate the need for your company’s brand, or a particular product, to undergo a redesign. Show executives the design-forward approach a competitor is leaning on and how that’s contributed to their success. With a redesign that shows how your company’s product or brand stands apart and values a design-forward approach, you could also achieve similar, if not greater, success than the competitor.
This article was last modified on August 30, 2021
This article was first published on August 30, 2021
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