At a creative brief, one of the most useful exercises I’ve found is to take a step back to ask:

“How does a user get to the entry point we’re designing?” “What is the thought behind the current design exploration”, and finally, “What is the goal of the high-level user experience?”

Is the goal to be interaction and conversion, or are you guiding the user from one area to another? By provoking these questions you can begin to explore loose solutions before the formal kickoff and to think of logical reasons why you would go a particular route. These preliminary ideas don’t have to go any further than your Moleskine, but it gives you a place to start early in your workflow.

I ask myself similar questions for direct response creative. The goal of DR work is to make the message and the catalyst for action the most prominent aspect of the page.

While the creative should be attractive and eye-catching, it should not overwhelm your message or your button. A few examples of questions you could ask yourself are:

“Is the value add, copy and call to action clear in the creative?” “Am I creating any additional friction that will hinder the click-through rate?”

If so, cut the fat and remove unnecessary elements and iterate. The viewer should clearly understand what the offer is and how to follow through on a purchase in a fraction of a second.

Try to put yourself in the mindstate of your target audience. What magazines do they read? What shows do they watch, etc? These questions can give you an idea of how to go about designing certain creative deliverables and what length of copy should be used. All of these questions are to give you a preliminary place to start and a way to jumpstart your brain into thinking of ways to solve a problem.