Good designers are adaptable. They can adapt to their audience with their knowledge of edgy, corporate, fun, serious, funky design. Variety and choice is key when you are pitching to your clients. If they don’t have choice, they won’t feel in control of their creative vision.
Providing the client choice is a great way for them to really identify with one path, and not just accept or reject one.
Listen to your clients as well – you are the marketing expert, but they are often a good way of gauging the tone that your creative will evoke may differ from the brain waves flowing within your agency.
Colour doesn’t make it another creative concept.
It’s obvious that you need a well-rounded staff, able to adapt to whatever needs your clients may have, but designers need to have an arsenal of style. They need to be the edge of the leading edge, because the visual is the thing that either creates the trend or dies before it. Copy, although intonation has changed a little, has a very small spectrum of ultimate change in mood and verbiage, but visuals are constantly in flux. Get a team of designers that are not only visionary, but on top of the game – or visionary because they create the game – is the best investment your company will make in its brain trust. Your designers need to think conceptually, be adaptable, and they need to be perfectionists. Tall order? Yes. But when the right designer comes along, design magic happens.