In the design process—whichever of the above it may be (including video or website design)—we start by understanding the situation in depth. For this, we even created a guide for internal use that you can download from its dedicated page: 13 steps toward a better design – Toud.

This first stage is the most important because, depending on your understanding of the situation and your capacity for empathy, you will either succeed or fail in creating something relevant to the audience within the limits of the brief.

Often, clients ask for “beautiful” graphic design that is pleasing to the eye. It’s natural—design must meet this requirement—but without a correct anchoring in the situation, it becomes a vague request. What does “beautiful” mean? More importantly, should it be relevant to the audience, generate impact, or just be “beautiful”?

Our promise is to help you tell your story and create impact. We constantly position ourselves between the constraints imposed by the brand (your vision, values, organizational culture), performance requirements, and audience expectations. This pressure always helps us find the right path. By allocating time and resources to understand these three elements, we succeed in building graphic design that tells the organization’s story.

Every design activity at Toud begins with intense analysis, empathy, and observation. After we find answers to a series of questions and correlate the solutions, we move toward design. This first stage is, in fact, about understanding the brief and placing it in context.

Design at Toud involves many trials. We build a series of sketches to validate ideas. Many fail, and in this way, we narrow the scope until we reach 5–10 validated ideas. Numbers vary from case to case. For example, in logo design processes, we have reached up to 100 sketches for a single project.

After this sketching and validation stage, we return to an in-depth analysis and testing process. At this point, we perform a further sorting of ideas or even open up new ones. However, at the end of it, generally, three ideas remain.

We always aim to go to the client with a solution, not just solutions. A single, committed, filtered choice—the best of what we reached in the creative process. There are cases where we choose to present two or three solutions. We usually do this when we feel the brief could be interpreted differently or allowed for a deviation.

The graphic design process at Toud is intense and has a significant component of empathy, analysis, and contextual understanding.