Leading the Visual Design Team

Established a visual design team for the Houston Innovation Hub to increase the client experience through microsites, bespoke presentations, sketch-note taking, and storytelling.

Client

Accenture Houston Innovation Hub

Year

2020

Skills

Process Design Creativity Business Operation

The Challenge

In order to continue to create unique experiences for clients, the Houston Innovation Hub needed to develop a visual design framework and offering. My task was to create an internal visual design team, leveraging graphic designers from our Costa Rica studio. We had been working with the studio on an ad hoc basis, but I believed it was important to streamline the process and create an offering. This would facilitate conversations with clients looking to better visualize and story-tell their project strategies.

The Process

Through participating in consultations with clients for our innovation sessions, I discovered our business stakeholders weren’t aligned with our visual designers.
To resolve this, I created a standard intake way of working that ensured both parties were aligned. Partnering with visual designers, we co-created an offering to fulfill the most common needs of our clients. The offering included a design refresh for standard presentations and a visual story telling capability. We consolidated all our current templates into a repository for the team to reuse in future engagements.

‍

I created a process that included a landing page (website) to better manage all internal requests and provide a high-level view of existing visual design offerings.

Having the website with clear instructions, templates, and list of offering allowed for Innovation Designers to increase their quality of client deliverables.

‍

The Impact

By creating a standardized process, the design team could focus on story telling and enhancing their designs, instead of continuously aligning on design requirements. This allowed our team to create a strong brand that encouraged repeat client engagements and attracted new clients interested in setting their storytelling capabilities apart. In the first year of leading the team, we created an additional $100k of profit for the Houston Innovation Hub.

‍

Bespoke templates are built for elevated client experiences. However, we release new templates every quarter to keep the quality of deliverables fresh!

Self-Reflection

This project combined my passion for art and creativity with my management skills. Tackling the corporate world with a focus on innovation and creativity has given me the opportunity to expand my thinking and deliver value in a differentiated way. Leading the design team has also expanded my coaching and people development expertise. These experiences have enabled our team to create stories that influence senior stakeholders and execute them in a unique way.

‍

No items found.