What Is Design Process and Why Is It Important?

Discover how the design process works, the importance of different approaches, and how to use it to enhance your creativity

We tend to believe new ideas emerge in bursts of inspiration, or as the result of unconscious work based on luck and a bit of talent, however, creative ideas and solutions often have more to do with your approach than chance.

Many experts have examined this process in detail to gain a better understanding of how it works; graphic designer Jan Wilker (@janwilker) is one of them. Working at his New York-based design studio, karlssonwilker, Jan is constantly seeking fresh ideas to keep his broad client list happy (some of the names he works for include Bloomberg, Capitol Records, Nintendo, Puma, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York).

Here, he teaches us about design process and how it can influence your way of coming up with new ideas.

What is design process?

Design process is the foundation on which any product is based, it explores how do we do what we do? Essentially, it’s a common set of steps that creatives use to create products and processes that work.

Design process or processes?

“As designers, even if we went to art school, we will rarely talk about the importance of design process. We were left to our own devices, to use our talent and design the way we felt like designing,” Jan observes. However, he notes, "There are many design approaches around the world, varying from country to country, from person to person and they're all equally valid—and best deployed depending on the project or assignment at hand”.

Discovering this helped Jan to understand that, "we as designers should have more than one tool in our toolbox,” he observes. “The old saying of: ’If all you have is a hammer, every problem will look like a nail’ is certainly true in our profession. So, more tools in our toolbox will allow us to react better."

The toolbox he’s talking about is your design process, or rather the multiple design processes. To perform to the best of our capabilities, he concludes: “We want to be conscious in our design process, we want to be present while designing, and we want to be in control.”

The stages of the archetypal design process

When starting a new design project, Jan explains we go through the following basic stages in the archetypal reason-based design process:

1. Research

This is when you systematically compile and organize information.

Jan highlights that “many designers, myself included, see research also as the inspiration phase... [but] inspiration is the opposite of research. Inspiration means I look for specific things to inspire me to use an ideation, whereas research is very neutral and part of a scientific method."

2. Ideation

This is when you come up with ideas inspired by the information you compiled. “Ideation doesn’t mean having to come up with one idea, it means coming up with one fantastic idea, ten good ideas, and a hundred bad ideas,” he notes.

3. Verification

This is when you test your ideas against everything you discovered during your research. This happens when you present to your client, speak to your boss, or examine your project by yourself.

4. Execution

This is the final stage, only reached after the other stages are complete and you're ready to commit to the one idea that works better than all the others.

The loops

There are important relationships between the stages that can be represented as a loop. For example, exploring the relationship between research and ideation, Jan notes that your research allows you to come up with new ideas, then you go back and check these ideas against your research.

"These loops happen everywhere; how we can see these loops is as quality assurance... They mean you can always go back and start the process again," while generating multiple ideas along the way.

There's also another important feedback loop between validation and execution. This last loop is particularly interesting, in Jan’s view: “An amazing idea with a bad execution adds up to a mediocre project, or you could say a mediocre idea with an excellent execution still only adds up to a mediocre project. So, what you want to make sure is that the idea is your best idea, and also that the execution is the best you can do,” he underlines. That's why it's always important to have a way back to the beginning of the process.

Why is the design process important?

One of the reasons why this process is useful is because, "it's great for sharing with a client,” Jan notes. “As it is reason and logic-based, every step of the way the client will understand where you are in the process. As a designer, you can explain everything that’s happening at all times. Everything is connected and linked through logic, so no surprises.”

The need for other approaches

Most research processes involve a series of stages that we often don’t often analyze because they appear logical. However, logic isn’t always the best way to achieve new ideas.

Although this format is often efficient, Jan believes it's important to think about your design process; he finds it clumsy to apply the same process to every kind of project indiscriminately. “We should respond differently to different projects. A poster should be responded to differently than a logo assignment," he adds. “And while this linear and reason-based process is extremely efficient, it is also not very surprising to us."

According to Jan, it’s important to learn other ways of solving the design puzzle, to be able to come up with unexpected results. These include more entertaining and alternative approaches that force you out of your comfort zone and help generate fresh ideas.

Want to discover different approaches to make your design process more fruitful? Don’t miss the Hands-On Design: Reinvent Your Creative Process course. Graphic Designer and Creative Director Jan Wilker helps you rethink your design process with playful experiments that allow you to adapt to the specific needs of your project.

You may also like:

- Graphic Design books to read in 2023
- 6 Design Documentaries That You Need To Watch
- Adobe Illustrator for Graphic Design, a course by Art Director and Graphic Designer Valeria Dubin