What business leaders should ask of designers
Design isn’t just about typography or colour palettes — it’s about the way a business or charity is experienced, communicated, and felt — the subtle emotions that are often hard to define. Yet too often, leaders treat design as decoration rather than strategy, resulting in brands that chase trends, fail to reach their potential, or struggle to connect meaningfully with the people they aim to serve. When used strategically, brand and design can be a really powerful tool. But to use it effectively, leaders need to know what to ask of their designers. Here are the key questions we would be asking:
1. How does this design connect to our strategy?
Design should go beyond surface aesthetics. Every visual element; typeface, colour, layout, imagery, should serve the organisation’s goals: attracting the right audience, communicating values, standing out from competitors, and building trust. A simple way to guide this is by defining three core brand words, concise, memorable descriptors that give designers something tangible to measure their decisions against.
You could ask your designers:
- How does this design align with our brand words?
- What will this say to our audiences about who we are?
2. What story are we telling?
Design is storytelling. Whether it’s a brand identity, a campaign, or an internal report, it needs to say something clear, memorable, and human.
Ask your designers:
- What story does this brand identity tell at a glance?
- Is this story consistent across our channels?
- How might different audiences interpret it?
3. Does this design work for our audience?
Most brands engage with a range of audiences, and their visual language should reflect that. At times, communication may need to be formal and corporate, while at other times it can be more relaxed and approachable, such as on social media. There is a spectrum of design decisions based on audience, context and content.
With this in mind, you could ask your designers:
- Where on the spectrum should this design sit?
- Does the design work within the brand?
- Does the design work for the audience?
StudentCrowd’s brand spectrum
4. What does success look like?
Without data, it’s hard to know whether a design is “working.” Success could be improved recognition, better engagement, stronger internal alignment, or a smoother user journey.
Ask your designers:
- What behaviours should this design encourage?
- How will we know if it’s effective?
- What feedback loops can we use to refine it?
5. Does it work for your employees as well?
Design isn’t just for customers — it also shapes the culture inside your business or charity. Employees who understand and respect the brand are more likely to champion it.
Perhaps ask your designers:
- How can we involve staff in the process?
- What tools (templates, guidelines, assets) will make adoption easy?
6. And one for your brand designers, how will this grow with us?
This question is aimed at your branding team, whether in-house or an external agency. Your brand identity should be flexible enough to grow with you, whether through new products, markets, or initiatives or just over the course of time. A rigid design system can quickly become limiting rather than empowering.
Ask your designers:
- Can this system accommodate sub-brands or new campaigns?
- How does this identity leave room for future evolution?
- What happens if we double in size or pivot our focus?
Business leaders don’t need to be design experts — but they do need to ask the right questions. When you ask designers about strategy, story, scalability, and success, you shift design from “making things look nice” to “making things work better.”
At a dozen eggs, we believe design is most powerful when it’s a collaboration between business leaders who know their strategy and designers who know how to translate it into form, story, and experience. When leaders ask the right questions, design can aid the core strategy.
