Collaborating across writers, designers and strategists
Launch library · evergreen read
The strongest creative work rarely comes from disciplines working in strict sequence, with a strategist handing a finished brief to a writer, who then hands a finished script to a designer at the very end. Genuine collaboration, where each discipline can shape the others' thinking early in the process, tends to produce ideas none of them would ever have reached working alone.
This kind of collaboration requires a level of mutual respect between disciplines that is easy to state in principle and considerably harder to practise in reality, since it means genuinely valuing a designer's instinct about a headline or a writer's instinct about layout, rather than treating those instincts as outside each person's proper professional lane.
Structuring a process to deliberately allow this kind of exchange, rather than simply assuming it will happen naturally on its own, usually produces considerably better results. Even a short joint session early in a project, where all three disciplines are genuinely in the room together, tends to surface ideas that a purely sequential process would never uncover on its own.