Five simple tips for a smooth running studio

For well-established studios these tips will be well established but if you are setting up a new studio, my five go-to tips will help you get up and running.

1. Font Management

The benefits of Font management software will vary depending on whether you are an agency working on multiple clients each with their own font set, or if you are in-house in which case your fonts will likely be less in number. In either case though, the number 1 benefit is avoiding duplicate fonts from multiple sources which causes confusion and leads to inaccurate use.

Avoiding sharing fonts by zips then being saved onto local drives is a complete win - for me at least.On the agency side, you can then group the fonts by client so designers can just download what they need rather than trawling through a long list to find what they need.

2. Design libraries to share colours, icons and commonly used assets

If your studio is using Adobe CC suite, then you have use of CC library in which you can create shared colour swatches for your brand(s), drop in logos, icons and character styles. And the same principles apply to Figma, if your studio is in that world. In either case, using libraries is invaluable as designers (UI, visual, motion - in the case of CC) will have all they need in the app without having to hunt around for pesky hex codes. So not only does this save time, it reduces inaccuracy with copying the wrong hex code, or being supplied an old logo.

3. Common folder structures

Organising your work in the same way across all jobs, means anyone who has to jump in to pick up a job can quickly get to grips with where assets are. Think of that freelancer who has been brought in to cover someone’s holiday and has to finish an urgent job - will they quickly be able to understand where everything is…?

But it’s not just for the benefit of the ad-hoc freelancers. It’s good discipline to structure things logically, consistently and with a common naming convention. Equally, moving previous versions to a folder so you do not end up with imageName-final-v5.jpg. Final is final, all others should be elsewhere!

4. Brand Guidelines

This should go with out saying but it isn’t always the case, but brand guidelines should be easily accessible to all. If the studio is working up some new formats for print and need to double check the logo safe space, they don’t want to be digging through URLs to find the guidelines have moved. Or are out of date. In addition, brand guidelines are often extensive coving digital, print, TOV, colour & type so it’s important that they are structured in a way that makes them easy to use and quick to get to the information you need.

5. User guides & templates

Are all of your designers, content creators, video and motion experts fully aware of the formats they are creating content for? And do they have access to the latest specs for any given format. One of the key ways to ensure consistency - and therefore efficiency as you are not having to redo work - is to have templates which correctly map to where the content is being used. For example safe spaces for Instagram stories, end frame cards for YouTube allowing for the video thumbnails being placed, display ads allowing for the ‘ad choices’ button.

Equally, if you are a content heavy business with a CMS, are your CMS templates up to date? And do content creators understand how the CMS responds with different break points, how typography might change (both in terms of size and position). It does take time to create templates and user guides as it does maintaining them, but the benefits in time efficiency are considerable.

If only running a content production studio was as simple as the above. But these tips should help save you some time and stress along the way.