Using visual design principles to write a press release

Spoiler alert: it’s not rocket science.

I'm a veteran graphic designer. My job is to create epic stories through visual design—be it in print or digital media. I'm really good at what I do. But writing? Not so much. That doesn't mean I am bad at it: I've been an avid reader my whole life, a blogger, a zine writer, a Twitter warrior, a manual creator, a closet novel-starter (rarely finisher), and even turned my “pen” used to some magazine articles. But there's one thing I had never written before: a press release.

So, how did I do it? I went back to my tried-and-true visual design process and followed the same steps to write the press release: 

1: Research

After two thirds of my life spent mostly in front of Adobe products, I started a project I knew nothing about the way I start all my design projects: with research. When designing, a lot of my research time is spent looking at visuals, but for writing, a lot of my research time was spent reading press releases. I probably read about 40-50 with similar themes in one sitting. It IS very much a templated art, and reading them all, i got an idea of what that template should look like. Stephen King’s first writing tip on his On Writing memoir is to read. It’s as relevant in writing horror fiction as it is to write a press release. So that’s what I did, I read. A lot.

2: Sketch your ideas

When designing, my second order of business is to grab a piece of paper and sketch ideas. No software, just old fashioned paper and pens, and some time thinking things through—it doesn’t even have to be good, my sketches are stick figures and crazy lines and you’d NEVER guess I design for a living from them. The important thing about the sketching step is that you put ideas down on paper so you can start shaping your project outside of your head. For the press release, I did it somewhat similarly, but instead of drawing, I opened a notebook and wrote down an outline, people I wanted to talk to, sections of other press releases I found interesting, and so on.

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3: Talk to other people

My third step when designing is to talk to people. Usually the client, to have an idea what they are looking for, who their audience is, what their goals are with the project. Sometimes that conversation leads to reiterating steps one and two. When writing that first press release, I booked some time with people that knew more about the subject matter than I did, and were also stakeholders on this release, and interviewed them, so I could hear it in their own words what their thoughts and goals were with this specific project I was writing about.

4: Dump your ideas on the page

Now it’s when the design/writing actually starts. This part is NOT glamorous at all. While designing, I call this phase the “brain dump,” I just open my Adobe software of choice and dump all the copy I have, my ideas, inspiration images, resources I need, color palettes, logos, etc. The same thing happened when writing, I opened Google Docs and dumped my outline, my favorite quotes from my stakeholders, jotted down some of the things I had thought about while doing all the research/interview portion. Not pretty, and not any semblance of an actual press release, but hey, it works for me.

5: Draft and iterate

From that brain dump, I make a draft. Be it a designed first version (or versions) of things, that I then send to the stakeholders to review with a lot of explanations and notes attached to explain what they are looking at; or be it my first press release, with a ton of added comments in the margins about words I was unsure of, sections we could cut for brevity, and placeholders for things I still needed to add and wanted help from the stakeholders to get. It’s also at this stage that I share my work with my peers: either other designers that I trust and value their opinion—working with them makes me a better designer—or in this case, to other writers I’ve worked with in my life that I know will be great sources of unbiased feedback and critique, especially because I am new at this.

6: Refine and edit

The next part of the design/writing process is probably the one I spend the longest at: refining. I use the feedback I gathered from others and spend some quality time with my work. No distractions, doors closed, phone on silent mode—that kind of quality time. I re-read my work several times, move things around, edit words out, refine my thoughts, have a despairing moment where I think everything is absolute trash, take a tea break, get back to it with a clear head and keep chiseling away till a masterpiece emerges. Or at least something functional that does the job, this is just my first press release after all, I didn’t expect an award from it, just a thumbs up from the boss and to publish it on Newswire.

7: Press play

Outlining my design—and writing—processes like this seems very linear, but a lot of it happens at the same time and/or we return to the beginning and reiterate and so on. But really, what I wanted to get at with this article is that maybe there is a right process to write a press release I could have learned at school, but here I am, almost two decades after college and I can use tried-and-true principles from my own craft to do something in a completely different medium. And guess what? It works. So feel free to replace “writing press release” with other creative endeavors and use my design process for your benefit.

Design | UACPA logo

Drumroll please…. It’s with great pleasure that I can finally reveal the new… UACPA* logo!

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*UACPA is the acronym for Utah Association of Certified Professional Accountants.

I already wrote a post about this redesign in the portfolio section of this site. But I wanted to use the blog to share a little bit more of the process, and how we went from their original design to the new one.

Former UACPA logo:

The Brainstorm:

I met with UACPA to learn more about their organization and what they were looking for in their redesign. We brainstormed words about visuals and icons that they would like to see, and I used that as a direction. Two of the strongest concepts were 1) Utah and 2) dashboards. My first step was to just get paper and pen (actually, iPad and iPencil) and get some ideas down. I like sketching things by hand because it helps you get ideas quickly down without getting bogged down by software constraints. If you know what you want, then you can figure out how to do it with the software later. Here’s my first round of sketches:

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From those, I picked up my favorites, and designed a ton of logos with them. No color at this stage, just icon + UACPA in a basic font. I think I had about 20 done at first, but narrowed it down to send to the client only about eight. We had four round of revisions, where we went from eight options to five, then to three, then to two, to our final one.

There were some good ones from the beginning, but UACPA tested out the various options with their board and organization members to choose the logo that would best represent them.

The Chosen One:

One thing I enjoy doing as we iterate on a logo, is to keep track of all changes done throughout, and send it along with the new version, so the client can see where we are coming from. The chosen logo came a long way from round one to the final round.

And this is when it gets to the really fun part for me: putting all of it together in a brand guidelines document. I love seeing all the color versions of the logo come together, and define uses and spacing and all sorts of fun stuff.

If you want to read a little bit more about the process from the client side, watch the video below.

Hear about the creative process from the people who helped make the new look for the UACPA.