evaluating creative work
Evaluating Creative Work
Format:
This workshop can be taught in-person or online in one half-day or full-day session.
Group Size:
Minimum of 8
Previous Clients:
Xbox, Klaviyo, Zillow, Sonos, UW Medicine, Nordstrom
Past Attendee Feedback:
”Really enjoyed this session! I have had zero official training in how to critique creative. This was welcome and eye-opening. Great work.”
”I appreciated that we got to level-set up front, then actually practice. It helped me get more comfortable, and I could tell we all got better as we did more rounds of practice.”
“Highly practical, and immediately applicable to our day-to-day!”
“I loved this training. The templates and practice sessions were beneficial. I also appreciate how much preparation was put into it to ensure it resonated with our team.”
Why Take This Course?
Giving insightful feedback is one of the toughest jobs in the world. Whether you’re looking at work developed by an in-house studio or an outside agency, you're often faced with having to make quick judgments about creative concepts and the finer points of writing and design, even though you may be no expert on creativity, writing, or design. The second hardest job is to manage someone else who’s giving feedback to keep them glued to the agreed-upon strategy and not veer off into personal opinion. There is both an art and science to giving (or managing) clear, and helpful critiques — and that’s exactly what we’ll cover in this workshop.
Who Should Take This Class?
This workshop is for anyone who is asked to give feedback and/or approvals to creative work or manage the process of getting feedback from internal and external clients. Accordingly, brand teams, project managers, strategists, copywriters, designers, and creative directors will all find this material applicable to their work.
Course Outcomes
• Learn to give evaluations that aren’t personal or wholly subjective, but are keyed to the agreed-upon strategy
• Develop skill at managing internal and external client feedback to keep them on target
• Improve one’s ability to receive feedback in an open and non-defensive way
Course Description
In this workshop, we’ll start by agreeing on what constitutes exceptional work so we’ll know what we’re aiming for. We’ll then walk through the creative evaluation format recommended by SVC, and give participants the chance to role-play both the presenter and client in the feedback situation as we cover these topics:
The importance of developing work and then critiquing it based on a well-conceived creative brief
Creating a one-sentence creative brief or “one key message” for summarizing the essence of a brief
Walking through SVC’s recommended creative evaluation template and discussion guide
Making sure everyone involved is clear on next steps, even if they result in rejecting the work and asking the team to start over
Anticipating questions and methods for handling objections
Practice session so participants can walk through a feedback session and receive peer feedback
Prerequisites and Requirements
There are no prerequisites for this course.