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Famed advertiser David Ogilvy once said, “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.” Sounds great, but how exactly does the right “creative” get done in a way that makes sense for your business now and in the long run? The answer: design directors.
When the market’s a screaming match for attention, great design is the key to getting noticed in the chaos. A McKinsey study on the business value of design found that those who rated high in design “increased their revenues and total returns to shareholders (TRS) substantially faster than their industry counterparts did over five years — 32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher TRS growth for the period as a whole.”
A design director is a must for complex, multi-platform projects vital to business success. They guide your team toward optimal design-driven returns through team leadership, innovation-driven critique, technological innovation, and the creation of multi-platform design systems.
Let’s break it down:
A design director builds a foundation of collaboration with the design team to continuously refine and align design decisions with your business objectives throughout the project lifecycle. WillowTree Senior Design Director Ryan Davis explains, “We’re constantly asking, ‘How does this design decision drive value?’” This ongoing guidance enhances the team's existing skills and strategic focus, ensuring that every decision, whether big or small, is made with your key objectives in mind.
To foster groundbreaking innovation and uncharted user experiences, design directors excel at creating environments for critical discourse that are safe, supportive spaces — ideal for creative risk-taking. WillowTree design directors elevate the iterative process by establishing routine critique forums for designers that challenge and welcome new ideas.
For example, Davis stresses the "why" question as a central theme in his critique forums. Strong answers to the “why” question might include common usability heuristics or push boundaries toward new ways users want to engage. But beyond that, all the best answers to the “why” question will align with his client’s business goals.
This approach benefits the work in a few ways: First, it creates a space where designers feel safe pushing boundaries. Second, it helps us ship solutions that are as innovative as possible. Finally, as a result, you can trust that the deliverables we present for your feedback are cutting-edge, deeply thoughtful, and validated by critique.
Our design directors keep WillowTree (and, by extension, you) at the forefront of technological innovation. By providing additional guidance on when and how to implement new technologies — while considering ethical implications and maintaining high-quality standards — they ensure our design solutions are advanced, make sense with your team’s current technical capabilities, and align with your goals.
Generative AI has expedited the speed of creating proofs of concept, but with speed comes the need for informed judgment. “We can spin up images a lot faster now," explains Davis, "but it takes more discernment to know what is good and viable." By employing the right technologies at the right time, “we can simplify problems for our clients and build user trust,” says WillowTree Design Director Robbie McCown.
In short, as the digital realm evolves at breakneck speed, a design director's secret sauce for successfully integrating emerging tech into the production process for efficiency goes back to great critique – consistently interrogating every design decision to ensure the design team delivers maximum value.
Our design directors create consistency and innovative flow within our teams and across your platforms. With customers interacting through an average of nine digital touchpoints, multi-platform brand consistency is critical. After all, according to the brand consistency report by Salesforce, two-thirds of businesses credit brand consistency with revenue growths of at least 10%.
Design directors lead the creation of custom design systems: sets of principles, guidelines, and components that significantly reduce development time and UX bugs while increasing market velocity. A strong design system provides a single source of truth. It helps to streamline workflows and even future-proof design investments by making it easier to roll out updates consistently. Our design directors collaborate with the design team to create and implement bespoke design systems for your company that will last long term. This synergy between designers and directors can significantly enhance efficiency and speed up your time to market.
What does this look like? Designers create and apply these design systems to the UI, while directors apply them to the brand experience as a whole. “The design system acts as our blueprint, and I always want to ensure it's applied thoughtfully and consistently,” says WillowTree Design Director Cassie DelBiondo:
“When collaborating with multiple designers, my charge is to balance system consistency with each feature's unique needs while always prioritizing the user experience.”
For straightforward projects with well-defined user experiences and clear business outcomes, a single skilled designer might suffice. But if you're diving into complex, multi-faceted projects or leveraging new technology to engage customers in fresh ways, a design director ensures quality, consistency, and speed — and they can efficiently drive that team toward your business goals.
The question isn't whether you should invest in a design director. In today's hyper-competitive, user-centric market, the real question is: can you afford to navigate your digital innovation without one? Your next big success — or your next costly failure — may hinge on that decision.
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