This is a story of tight deadlines, pressure and getting things done. I have been working as Parrolabs’ lead designer for the last 2 years and have been growing with the team. In 2019, we were approached by a client in distress, who needed around 2500 digital banners in less than a week, for a well-known US based entertainment client. Honestly, I felt this could never be accomplished in such a short span of time.

They asked us..in what way can you contribute?

So we got our Design Team together and looked at the workload we had committed to. Turned out, that we had around 30% availability if we were to be creative. That meant, that we still needed to contract around 8 designers for the week.

Using Parrolabs’ pool of creative talent we quickly reached out to some people. At the same time, I sat down with the client and we setup Jira. Making banners does involve people with different skillsets, including a Graphic Designer, Motion Designer and in most cases a developer. Lastly, with Parrolabs’ emphasis on quality we included several QA steps and people in the process. We put the entire process into our Jira and shared it with the client.

The next morning we had the entire team fired up to get started on the banners. Using Jira and Google Drive and our private slack channel with the client we quickly started getting things in motion. Our Team collaborated directly with the end-client in the QA process. The first day we ended with several hundred’s of banners completed and QA-ed.

The client started putting the Banners directly into the Ad Buying Platform as there were several smaller campaigns to process. It was fun as we were able to see the direct results of our banners in different well-known entertainment news websites. To see such direct results just shows how close we can co-operate with our customers.

The next few days we completed several badges of banners. Though the team was stretched a little bit and we had several “Pizza Nights”, we were able to make the deadlines while maintaining the quality.

What we learned?

Needless to mention, there were several hurdles to take. Here are some things that are important and I would like to recommend to anyone in the same situation:

1) It is very important to have some sort of project management setup. While this might not be your $4M redevelopment project, it is still important that each person has a process to follow

2) When doing anything in digital, I recommend to always include a review (QA process). It is just that two sets of eyes, a process and checklist are crucial elements for any quality standard

3) Spend some more time on training. Don’t throw people in the deep end and hope they start floating. Like the famous Abraham Lincoln Quote:

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my ax. — Abraham Lincoln

That holds true for high volume creative like we do at Parrolabs. We did hold an intense training session on all details of the client. Meaning that many of the banners were first time right!

4) Get some more resources than you think are necessary. So that people don’t need to work day and night to make a deadline.