What’s a Living Comp?
Flat, PDF design comps are SO yesterday. JDM develops “Living” Design Comps on testing servers that allow clients to touch and understand how the site will feel, focus and function in a way no PDF could ever convey. As part of our web development process, Living Comps are our way of skipping all the traditional back-and-forth nonsense and dives right in to technical and creative development.
Traditional Process V.S. JDM’s Living Comp
Traditionally, you’d start of with a totally confusing “Wireframe” then move into scores of iterative “Roughs” then “Comps” then technical development (and the technical team has no say in the creative process) to arrive at a site that the client has been looking at for months just to say, “Hey, that’s not what I wanted!”
Why not skip to the Living Comp? Do any of these extra steps make sense to you?
In our Living Comp, the client has already put their ideas to the technical and the creative teams and allowed them to produce something that meets every one of their requirements but allows our team to be the experts and find unique strategies for achieving those goals.
Oh, our Living Comp design & development process is also 3 to 5 times faster and demands far less time from the client to arrive at the same (or better) result.
I can’t give away too much about the secret sauce, so just drop us a line and we’d be happy to walk you though it in more detail. Do you ever want to look at another Wireframe again?
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My clients fall more into the, “Black on white is boring. How about hot pink on lime green? And can we make the logo spin? And Ariel is boring, let’s use Comic Sans.”
Not sure how to transition from this to your process…
Love to answer that, Susan, but that’s part of the secret sauce.
I can tell you that there are “vendors” and there are experts/partners. Make sure you’re the latter…
Totally reminds me of that funny Oatmeal article: “How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell”. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell/
I guess the Living Comp is supposed to protect us from a similar fate…
Wait, wait, wait!
Do you mean you just blindly run off and develop a site without any planning, discussion or drafting?! Then just show it to the client and say, “here you go.”
That’s a recipe for disaster.
Thanks for the comment. Don’t panic. I think we just didn’t explain the process in enough depth. It IS kind of a secret sauce.
There’s lots of room for clients to weigh in and provide feedback. We also still use wireframes and roughs, but they are internalized for the most part.
These are critical steps in the design process but they are too confusing for most clients. In the end, clients will end up with something they didn’t know they approved and designers are upset their vision never saw the light of day.
Hope that clears that up.
Can you imagine if you had to repeat the process for each page template? What if you had 8+ page templates like we do?!
It could take 6-8 months the old way…!