Creating Stylescapes & Proposals

What is a Stylescape and how do I create one?

Ian Paget: When I started out as a graphic designer, I learned about mood boards and I saw the importance of creating one. And I remember a few years ago, I started to following what Chris was doing, and he was using this term Stylescapes. I remember back then thinking, “Oh this is just a mood board.” But I’ve learnt that it’s a lot more than that, and I’ve seen the real value to the approach. Could you explain to the audience what a Stylescape is and why you would use one in your logo design process?

Ben Burns: Yeah, absolutely. So Stylescape is a mood board, right, but the way that we’re putting Stylescapes together is so much more than a mood board. And it really originated from a point of frustration. Chris and Jose created this term Stylescape to represent what they were doing. And the reason why they made it was because they had a client that just could not decide on the direction that they wanted to go in. And so they would show logo after logo, after logo trying to nail this person’s direction and they just couldn’t find it. And so they realised that they needed a way for the company as a whole to be able to set like, I call it the compass direction. You may not know exactly where you’re going, but you can at least know that you’re going to go north or south or west for the project.

And so they started experimenting with different styles of mood boards. Eventually they landed on this term called Stylescape. And it’s a weird shape. It’s really long. It’s almost like one of those 49-inch monitor’s kind of shape. And it incorporates pretty much everything that you could create from a branding touchpoint point of view. So typography, wayfinding, colours, even iconography, UI design, interior design and it’s basically you pull all of these things together into one composition so that in one look you can see the visual direction of the brand. And that’s something that like even a mood board, even if you’re just cobbling together a Pinterest board of images, it doesn’t accomplish what a Stylescape accomplish because a Stylescape is in and out of itself a composition. So it’s a long way of saying it’s more like a mood board on crack.

Ian Paget: Is there any reason why you use that long wide format? I watched the Build a Brand series you did, which I’ll link to in the show notes, and I understand why it would work well in an in-person meeting format like that as you can place them down on the table. But do you still use that same wide format even when you’re presenting these to clients over the internet?

Ben Burns: Yeah, we do. So for those of you guys at home, if you can picture something printed out that’s literally 55 inches long by maybe 15 inches tall, that’s how big these things are. So whenever we go to meetings, you have this like really impactful piece that you can leave behind for your client. And the beautiful thing is in email form or in digital form, what’s nice is you can walk the customer or the client through the Stylescape by showing them the whole picture first and then it breaks down to like two or three… I forget the exact dimensions. It breaks down to like three 1920 by 1080 almost slides, if you will, as you’re going through. So you can break up the presentation and do a deep dive in Zoom way in on the Stylescape and show them each integral piece of what you pulled into the composition. So it’s a good way to like zoom in basically.

Ian Paget: I never really thought about it like that. Since you can zoom in, and gradually slide across the page you can use it to tell a story for the identity. That’s a really nice way to doing it. I actually didn’t think the wide format would work that well on the screen, and thought an A4 type format would be more effective, but thinking of it like that I really like the idea. I don’t actually use Stylescape myself at the moment, although I do create more traditional mood boards frequently, but the wide format seems like a really smart way to do it, so I’m going to have to give it a go for myself.

Ben Burns: Yeah, yeah. And you don’t have to call them Stylescapes. Call them mood boards or whatever you want. The whole point is that like we just want to move past a Pinterest board and into something that’s more like a composition because the key to this thing is being able to see how different pieces work together. And so you’re literally photoshopping out the backgrounds of packaging and then superimposing that image over maybe like a UI design. And you’re curating all these gems that you find and building something new and that’s something new is like the sum or the totality of everything else. That’s the whole point. So call it whatever you want, but we want to make sure that you’re creating something that can stand on its own two feet.

Ian Paget: Absolutely. I noticed in the Build a Brand series that you present more than one stylescape. I was surprised by this because when you work in a more strategic way, which you guys do, you have a clear direction for the brand – knowing who they are as a business, who they’re up against in the market, and who they’re aiming to target. I would have thought you would want to show the one solution that you would recommend based on all of that information. What’s the reason why you’re presenting multiple directions?

Ben Burns: Yeah, so this is where the divergent and convergent theories of branding come together. So we want to create as little as possible. It’s just we want to be efficient with our creativity and we want to be efficient with the way that we spend the time on the project. So curating and pushing these things… Collecting images and creating Stylescapes is a lot less work and it’s a lot less effort than actually creating brands to pitch to the client or to show the client for approval. So we present multiple Stylescapes because they’re easier to create. I can do one in four to six hours and it’s a great way to show the client like, “Hey, I know you said modern, I know you said minimal, but here are three or four or five different ways that we can interpret those words.”

So when you’re translating words into visuals, that’s the biggest jump in the project. That first step… Translating words individuals is probably the toughest thing to do because you’re still guessing even if the client described what you’re thinking to a T, they may be thinking something totally different. So using Stylescapes to bridge that gap is a great way to do that efficiently. And then from there, once they choose a Stylescape, the sandbox that you have to plan gets a lot smaller. So it’s a lot easier to create a logo or to create a brand or a UI that’s exactly what the client wants based on their decisions from the Stylescape.

Ian Paget: It sounds like they creates a lot of clarity, especially when words like modern can be so subjective, and mean different things to different people. I would assume that in these scenarios where you do show three or four options, there might be parts of one and bits of another that the client might feel more appropriate, and then you can pull these bits together and create a new one that your client would eventually agree on.

Ben Burns: Oh yeah, yeah absolutely. We do rounds of revisions for Stylescapes just for that purpose, because a lot of times they’ll see some… especially with the wild cards. The wild cards are something else. We’ll do three that are based on what we think that the client wants, and then we’ll throw one more in there that’s really just kind of something special. Maybe it’s just an off-the-wall thing that we’ve been into, or maybe we’re stretching the client’s words just a little bit further. And a lot of times the clients will see the wild card and they’ll be like, “Ooh, I hadn’t pictured that, but that looks really good.” And I want to say maybe five or six times out of 10 they’ll choose the wild card. And yeah, it’s just a wonderful thing.

Ian Paget: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, I know you have a course on how to create stylescapes for anyone that wants to really dig deeper into how you go about putting them together. But so listeners have a starting point, would you mind spending a couple of minutes talking through how you would go about creating one?

Ben Burns: Absolutely, yeah. The first thing that you need is the words that describe what the client wants. And so whether that’s modern or minimal or snazzy, I don’t know. The clients say some crazy things sometimes. But you want to have a list of words that you’re going to base the Stylescape on. And then you’re going to go into curation. So you’re going to collect images from the internet, Pinterest is great for this, Dribbble is great for this, Behance, even just Google. You’re going to collect all these images that represents those words.

So let’s say we’re doing minimal, for example. I would look for a minimal topography and a minimal brochure design, minimal wayfinding. I would try and search and find images that represent all of the different touch points seen through the lens of that one word. So once you have your collection, once you have your file folder full of images, then you’re going to start photoshopping things together.

And we go in deep on composition in the course. So I’m not going to cover that too much here, but there’s a way that you can compose these things so that the piece has a good flow to it. And you want each section to flow into the next. And then one thing that we do is we actually pull in a user profile from our discovery sessions. So this is the customer of the client. And we actually find an image that represents this profile or this person and we put that image right on the Stylescape. So we can meet her. It’s like, “Hey, is a soccer mom really going to want to be like shopping at some Hypebeast Store?” Maybe, but probably not so having that user profile image on the Stylescape is a good way to like measure what we’re doing.

And then once the composition is done, you move on to the next one. How else can you interpret those words. Once you have three or four, then you move into presentation. And presenting these things to clients is… it can be a little challenging because some people, especially like really business-minded folks are not going to realise that they’re looking at examples. So there’s a good way that you can guide them through the composition and saying, “Hey, you have to use your imagination here. Does this fit the brand that you’re trying to create or does this fit the UI that you’re trying to create?” Once the presentation’s done, there’s probably going to be some revisions and then you’re in the clear hopefully.

Ian Paget: Brilliant. That was a really good explanation in a short space of time, and as I mentioned if anyone wants to really dig deeper into understanding the composition you guys use, as you mentioned they can check out the course which will go into more detail.

One question I do have which I know some in the audience might be asking.The images that you’re sourcing, when you’re creating websites and brochures and work for clients, you need to source images that have the copyright to use, such as royalty free images or you might pay a photographer. With stylescapes, to provide some clarity to the listeners, am I right that you can pretty much use any imagery that you find online, and that you don’t need to worry about copyright because it’s in a private setting between you and your client?

Ben Burns: Yeah. So I’m not a lawyer. So take all of this with a grain of salt. And for all of these people who are out there creating amazing things who get pulled onto mood boards and Stylescapes, I can understand why you would be upset if you saw this. And I totally get it.

Legally however, we’re not adopting the work and selling it to the client. That would be bad. That would be against the law. It would infringe on someone’s copyright. Using another person’s work as inspiration and as a part of the process to understand what the client wants, that’s okay. And so we checked with a copyright attorney about this and she said, as long as you’re not selling this stuff as a deliverable or directly copying them in the final result, you’re good. The other thing is that in the composition section of the course we guide you through how to alter these images so that they all fit together.

So if you have two photographs that have been edited by two different photographers, they’re going to look different. So we walk you through how to tweak the color and tweak the levels and tweak the exposure to get them to look the same. So you’re actually changing these things as you go to fit. But I think that the biggest distinction is that this is a part of a creative process and not a deliverable. So you don’t sell these things to the client, you’re just using them to figure out what the client wants. And if you can understand that distinction, that’s going to keep you in the clear.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen big design agencies like Moving Brands do this too. I was lucky enough a few years ago after winning a competition to have a tour of their studio in London, and I got to spend some time with their creative director to ask questions. He shown me some of the work, and they did pretty much what you do with stylescapes, but they did it in a video form, so they could add music, and an audio story too. This was all made using found imagery and video that they pulled off the internet – none of it they could use publicly, but it helped to show what they had in mind before investing too much time into building the identity.

The reason why I’m bringing this up is that you can use the same processes that Blind use to create stylescapes, but you can create your own way of doing it. Stylescapes isn’t the only way to do, it’s just one nice way that solves a lot of those problems that you mentioned that Chris and Jose was having early on with clients.

Ben Burns: And it’s an old practice too. It is such an old practice because you’ve got… I remember when I was working in an agency as an intern really, really early on, the internet was there, right, and we were using it on a daily basis. However, the agency had been around for 20 years. And so they had a research room and you could go into this room and it was like this big library. And in this room there were several different huge file cabinets. These things were probably six feet wide, maybe six feet tall, they were just tanks. And you could go in there and open these massive drawers. And the weight of them was just insane. And there were all these files of cutouts of magazines and books and newspapers that were all reference material.

So even back in the day, even without the internet, this was going on. People were collecting reference materials so that they could curate things and show them to the clients and understand what the client’s looking for. We’re just doing it digitally.

Ian Paget: Yeah for sure – it’s tried and tested, and works well. I think even without showing something like this to the client, anytime I’ve created mood boards, or pulled together imagery in the way you mentioned, it’s really helped a lot to steer the direction of the identity, and also inspires me to create something way better than I would have done without doing that work. So it provides clarity for you, and it’s a fantastic approach.

So, listeners, if you do want to check out the Futur course to learn more about stylescapes, I’ll set up an affiliate link fiolentvillage.com/stylescapes – that way when you purchase the product, you’ll be supporting the logo geek podcast in the process, at no extra cost to you.

How to Create the Perfect Project Proposal

Ian Paget: I want to use the rest of the time we have to talk through creating Proposals. I know you created the Perfect Proposal product which is really solid, and I don’t know if it’s your most popular product, but I’ve spoken to a lot of designers that have purchased this, and used it as a foundation to build their own proposals.

For listeners that don’t already use proposals, and aren’t familiar with why they would need to provide one, would you mind talking through what a proposal is and why you would need one as part of your sales process?

Ben Burns: Yeah, absolutely. So I can remember back in the early days of my freelancing career, the first time somebody asked me to send them an estimate and they used the word estimate. And I remember thinking like, “Okay, there’s probably a good way to do this,” but I had no idea. So I basically just cobbled together an email and just said, “Hey, based on this I think, uh,” and I’m pretty sure I put the words, I think, uh. “I think, uh, this project is going to be $50.” And the tone of my email really probably sounded like that. It was unsure. It was not professional.

And at that point, I started looking for a solution and I knew that there was something out there and I was completely falling to this term proposal. And what I’ve learned since and used to the advantage of both the business that I’ve grown and sold and then Blind, which is, the parent company of the Futur is that…

…I totally lost my train of thought.

Ian Paget: Oh no, that happens to me, so don’t worry. I can edit this out.

Ben Burns: What was your question?

Ian Paget: It was, what is a proposal and why would you need to put one together?

Ben Burns: Oh, okay. All right. We should leave that in there. That’s funny.

Ian Paget: Yeah, no worries, I will – shows it happens to the best of us. haha.

Ben Burns: All right. So a proposal. So let’s say that you’re talking to a client and you unearth a need for your services, whether you’re a logo designer or UI designer, you can do something that’s going to help them out and they can pay you. And you have this conversation where it’s like, “Yeah, typically my work is X amount of dollars per hour or it’s a flat fee of whatever, $5,000, $10,000.” And then the client says, “Okay, well, send me an estimate or send me a proposal,” and they ask for something, ask for a document. And so what I like to think of a proposal is the paper proof of a conversation that you had with a client.

And that comes from Blair Enns’ Win Without Pitching’, fantastic book, I highly recommend it. But you use the proposal in order to help close the job. And this is the take home item that the client can bring to their company or to their boss or just have themselves and keep to themselves to review the deal when you’re not on the phone. So a proposal is basically saying, “We’re going to do all of these things and we are going to charge you all of these dollars in exchange.” And the way that we put together proposals, it’s really a representation of our company as a whole, and then we also include our capabilities. So some of the case studies that we’ve done in the past and our services and things like that. But there’s a certain way that you can construct these things that helps close the deal.

There is one important distinction that I want to make sure that all the listeners understand is, a proposal is not a contract. And so that’s something that go really, really deep in the perfect proposals. You’re sending a proposal for a job and when the proposal is approved, then you move into the contracting phase. So there’s an important distinction. But you want to have something that the client, especially if they have a team or if they have a marketing director and they report to a CMO or a CEO, you want to have something that they can carry around and say, “This is what I want to buy and this is what they can promise to do and this is what they have done.” And that’s what a proposal does.

Ian Paget: Fantastic. I want to steer people towards the perfect proposal product you have, and I’ll create another link for that fiolentvillage.com/perfectproposal – I’ve gone through this product myself and I need to stress that you haven’t just thrown together a template. You’ve also included the one that Blind actually send to client, and for me that was one of the most inspiring things that made it worth buying. When you work for yourself, as these things aren’t publicly available you often question how big agencies do this type of thing, so you have no idea how you compare with the rest of the market, but with this I was like “Hah, okay. So that’s what a big agency like Blind would send!”

The product includes really solid templates, and a supporting guide, but I think just seeing the example from Blind alone makes it totally worth the sale. I really do think it’s one of the best Futur products that I’ve personally seen. And a lot of designers I’ve spoken to recently are redesigning their proposals based on this. So I think it’s definitely worth people checking out.

Ben Burns: Well, thanks. Yeah, I appreciate that. And as the author of the kit, it’s so incredible to see the testimonials come back. Like we had this one kid in… I want to say it was in Houston, Texas in America. And we met him at a Future meet-up. We were there for client work. And we did this little Future meet-up in the bar and we had about 20 people show up. And this kid shows up and he says, “Man, listen, I just want to thank you for the perfect proposal.” He’s like, “I used that to land a $10,000 job.”

And he was like, “Then I realised that I didn’t have a discovery process. So I bought Core and I used Core to run the discovery and that $10,000 job turned into $40,000 job. And then I knew that I wanted to keep doing this, so I enrolled in Business Bootcamp and then all of a sudden now these jobs are just rolling in.” And he was 20 years old.

Ian Paget: Wow.

Ben Burns: And I was blown away. Sometimes all it takes is just a little bit of like transparency and a little bit of like a spark to just get somebody into the mindset that they need to be in and to get them the resources that they need to do big things. So I was just seeing that stuff come in. It’s worth the whole authorship writing process.

Ian Paget: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I’ve gone through Core myself and that’s really actionable – it’s a process, and you can run a meeting directly from that. I spent a lot of money on courses over the years and for brand strategy in particular, and most of the time they leave it open to interpretation, and you need to create your own workshop off the back of it, but with Core, you can purchase it, and run a workshop using the framework. The perfect proposal is the same – you can take it as it is, and swap out your own information that will help you convert clients more effectively. It’s amazing with a bit of mindset change and a bit of confidence, that even a 20-year-old can really up their game. Especially getting 40k jobs like that. I am jealous.

Ben Burns: Yeah, it was awesome.

Ian Paget: With proposals, would you put a different template together for different types of projects?

Ben Burns: It depends. By template do you mean a different design?

Ian Paget: I mean the underlying contents of the proposal. You’d obviously want to keep the design the same, but would you create an entirely different document for different types of clients, or for the different type of work you carry out?

Ben Burns: That’s a great question. Number one, I would not change the design. So the template should be branded to your business. Whatever your agency or freelance brand is, that’s the brand that the proposal should boast. But as far as the content, over time, you’re going to be sending out a lot of these things. And you want to be able to create one and send it out in under an hour. I remember when Blind was at its busiest, we’ve slowed down Blind pretty dramatically. We’re actually not even taking on clients right now to focus on the Future. But when Blind was running, I was sending two or three proposals every single day. And so we were… I had to do these super, super quickly.

So what I found was, I was creating this backlog of copy. And I made a swipe file for myself, which is basically this big word document or it’s on notion, I believe, full of copy that describes each individual deliverable or each individual page that goes into a proposal. And so whenever I was creating something new, I would just copy and paste over from the swipe file. And this saved so much time. In the next iteration of the perfect proposal, what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to build that swipe file into the kit so that you guys have pretty much everything that I wrote over the years. Because, how many times have you drawn up a proposal and then written the same thing over and over again? And it’s that redundancy that just kills your time. Like describing what Stylescapes are in a proposal. You don’t need to rewrite that between every single client.

So that’s going to be included. And then the other thing is the case studies inside the proposal. Sometimes, if we can tell that the client really hasn’t explored our website or if we have case studies that are somewhat restricted on where we can share, like maybe we signed an NDA on them that doesn’t expire yet, so we can’t put them on a website, but they’d be perfect to show to one client, we’ll put those in the proposal. And it really helps to have a bucket of case studies that you can pull from. So the way that we have ours arranged is we’ll have like a master keynote of all of our case studies and then whenever I’m putting together a proposal, I’ll copy and paste two or three of the most appropriate case studies for that client. So that way, even if two clients got together and shared their proposals between each other, there might be some duplication in the language, but they’re going to look very, very, very different even though it didn’t take much time to put together at all.

Ian Paget: Amazing. That’s what I was hoping that you would recommend, to have that one master file and edit it accordingly. And it’s awesome that you’re going to be adding a swipe file to the product so that people can chop and change things easily.

Ben, I’m conscious we’re short on time, so I’m going to wrap up the interview now, but thank you so much for coming on. I think even though this has been a shorter episode, we have packed in loads of stuff into this interview, so I know listeners will have enjoyed it. Thanks so much for coming on!

Ben Burns: Aw, thanks so much. And for everybody listening, just remember, I know that a lot of people are going through tough times right now. We’re right in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, but just remember this too shall pass. We’re going to get through this and I hope everyone is happy and safe and home.

Ian Paget: Thanks again Ben. It’s been been good to chat.

Ben Burns: Well, thanks a bunch, man. I had a blast. This was fun.

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