Who better to lead a redesign than those who know the brand best? Four in-house departments share their makeover strategies.

It's catch-22. As an in-house designer, you know the brand inside and out because you work with it every day. But that same familiarity—the fact that you're right down the hall—can often work against you in the eyes of company decision makers. Too often, an expert is defined as someone from the outside. This mindset can make it difficult for in-house designers to champion their own ideas for redesigns and win the right to tackle major rebranding efforts over outside firms. The reality, however, is that inhouse departments head up stunning redesigns all the time. Here's a look at four different paths to success.

1. Become a Partner

After he joined Rand McNally in 2004, Joerg Metzner went to work repositioning his department within the company. “Design was an afterthought,” says the design director. “The general attitude was that in-house designers were just there to ‘make it pretty.'” He quickly moved his team out of a hidden, windowless room and started promoting their capabilities internally. The primary message: “We're partners in branding and problem solving. Bring us into the process earlier.”

Today his eight-person department is a critical part of the company's push for positive change. They've redesigned annual books, an effort that helped boost sales. One key change was the addition of local photography to map and guide covers. These images help consumers make an immediate connection with the product, and since many of the photos come free from chambers of commerce and tourist bureaus, it's a low-cost solution. Metzner and his team also worked to redesign and standardize the company's business cards and stationery, as well as refresh its logo.

He believes in-house designers need to position themselves as strategic thinkers rather than creative services. One change he made, for example, was the name of his department—from Art and Design to simply Design, emphasizing that his team's capabilities reach far beyond looks. Another key, he says, is getting in front of final decision makers, such as the president, CEO, or chief marketing officer. They're the people who can really green-light your ideas.

Metzner has also made a change that routes all design projects through his department. Previously, each marketing team had its own chosen outside designer or agency. The new approach promotes both consistency and cost savings. It also lets the design team decide what needs to be sent out. His final words of wisdom: “Let your light shine and be bold. Do multiple solutions. Really try to act like an outside design firm.”

2. Ask Questions

Martha Stewart is a company known for good design, so it's no surprise that its in-house design effort is well organized. Lara Harris is art director for Martha Stewart Everyday, the line of products sold at Kmart. She works in a group of seven designers that operates much like an agency. Each project starts with a creative brief and a kick-off meeting that includes designers, product managers, copywriters, and folks from production. “It's the launch,” she says. “We make sure everyone is on the same page and see what questions there are.”

Her team executes numerous package redesigns— projects prompted by everything from a simple desire to freshen up to the need to boost sales. A recent overhaul for a line of glassware was more utilitarian: The open packages were resulting in a lot of breakage. Designers needed to figure out how to recreate the feel of an open box without it actually being open. The solution was to hire a photographer to do silhouette shots of the products. These appear on the sides of the box in the same way they're stacked inside the package, mimicking the view you'd get if the box was transparent.

One of the most important aspects of any redesign, Harris says, is getting all your questions answered up front. Why is this being done? Who's your competition? Who's your audience? Another important line of thought, she notes, is asking what's missing—or not working—with the current design. If there's not a built-in process for establishing these signposts, she suggests getting organized and digging up the answers yourself. Her team, for example, visits competing retailers to see what a particular product is up against in the marketplace.

3. Listen to Your Inner Client

Tyndale House Publishers used to send the company's book catalogs to outside designers. But design manager C.J. Van Wagner thought the product coming back from the outside “was a mess,” so he approached company executives about making a change. He crunched the numbers and pointed out that hiring an art director would be much more cost-effective than tapping outside resources. Plus, this new staff member could tackle projects in addition to the catalogs.

Senior art director Barry Smith was hired and started transforming the look of the catalogs. He heads up a two-and-a-half person commercial design team while Van Wagner oversees Smith and a 21- person department that designs the company's books. Tyndale's Bible catalog, for example, now features original photography because Smith wanted to show people—thus giving a face to the company's customers. He also made the catalog easier for buyers to use and worked to give it brand continuity with the company's other catalogs.

One of the main goals was to forge a partnership with bookstores—to let them know that the publisher understands them and wants to help grow their business. It's an idea Smith hit upon after the sales team told him they wanted more shelf space. Rather than make the catalog a hard sell, he came up with the partnership concept to help achieve that goal. “It's really a matter of relationships,” Smith says about the success of the efforts. “We spend a lot of time with the sales team and try to understand what they're saying.”

4. Make Your Case

When Ann Neumann came on board as the Liberty Science Center's director of design, there was already an overall rebranding project underway. The New Jersey museum had worked with an outside company to do extensive market research, but when the visuals started coming in, Neumann wasn't happy. She felt the solutions were generic and the in-house team could create something more specific to the center. Instead of complaining, she put together an aggressive proposal to bring the project back inhouse, and her idea was approved.

Her advice for designers in similar situations is to make the business case for what you're proposing. To win projects, in-house teams have to show they can deliver work that's equal—if not better—in quality to that of external designers. Plus, they need to prove that they're affordable and can meet the project deadline. One thing Neumann pointed out, for example, was that her department could handle the redesign while still fulfilling their regular duties producing the museum's collateral material.

The museum's rebranding included everything from a new logo to communication materials. It also helped Neumann and her young design department prove themselves in a big way. “You have to establish your credibility and promote the talent of the staff,” she says. “We're only as good as our last project.” Now that the new system is in place, there's a new company-wide rule: Anything that the public will see has to be written by the communication department and designed by Neumann's 10-person team. It helps maintain brand consistency, as well as high quality.

Recommended Resources

Bringing Graphic Design In-House: How and When to Design It Yourself, by Orange- Seed Design, $35, Rockport Publishers

InSource: An organization of in-house graphic design professionals, InSource enhances “the understanding, impact and value of in-house design within the corporate environment.” InSource was created in 2002 to fill the void in opportunities for dialogue, training, and support for in-house design directors and managers. The perfect antidote for corporate creative isolation, InSource sponsors seminars on a range of topics relevant to in-house designers, and if you're too far away to travel, you can sign up to listen in by phone for a modest fee.

About the author

Michelle Taute is a freelance writer and editor in Cincinnati who specializes in design topics.

This article was originally published in the June/July 2006 issue of Dynamic Graphics Magazine.

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