In the design process, whatever it is from those listed above (or even the video or website ones), we start from an understanding of the situation and a deepening of it. For this, we even created a guide that we use internally and that you can also download from the dedicated page – 13 steps to a better design – Toud.

This first stage is the most important because, depending on the understanding of the situation and the ability to empathize, you will succeed or not, to create something relevant for the public and within the limits imposed by the brief.

Often, the creation of a beautiful graphic design that pleases the eye is required. It is natural, a design must meet this requirement, but it becomes, without a correct anchoring in the situation, a vague requirement. What does beautiful mean? And then, what is more important, to be relevant to the public, to generate impact or to be “beautiful”?

Our promise is to help you tell your story and create an impact. We constantly find ourselves between the constraints imposed by the brand (the vision, values, culture of your organization), those of performance, and those given by the public’s expectations. This pressure always helps us find the right way. By allocating time and resources to understand these 3 elements, we manage to build that graphic design that tells the story of the organization.

Any design activity, at Toud, begins with an intense activity of analysis, empathy, and observation. After finding out the answers to a series of questions, managing to correlate the solutions, we begin the design stage. This first stage is, in fact, one of understanding the brief and placing it in context.

Design, at Toud, means a lot of attempts. We build a series of sketches through which we try to validate ideas. Many of them fail and, in this way, we narrow down to 5-10 validated ideas. The numbers differ from case to case. For example, in the logo design processes, we reached 100 sketches made for a single project.

After this stage of sketches, and validation of ideas, we return to a process of in-depth analysis and testing. In this stage, we manage to sort out the ideas or even reopen new ones. But, at the end of it, there are basically 3 ideas left.

We always want to go to the client with a solution, not with solutions. With only one, assumed, filtered, the best of the ones we got in the creative process. There are also cases where we choose to present the client with 2 or 3 solutions. We usually do this when we feel that the brief could be interpreted differently or when it allowed a deviation.

The graphic design process, at Toud, is intense and has an important component of empathy, analysis, and understanding of the context.