Overview

On Q Financial is a national mortgage lender headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. The marketing department that I was employed under was tasked with supporting Mortgage Consultants all over the country. The design department’s primary responsibility was providing design assets within a 24 hour turnaround time between the initial request and first draft. As the number of Mortgage Consultants continued to grow, we needed a solution to accomodate for the increasing demand. As Creative Manager, I worked with various members of the marketing department to develop a whole new design system that would transform our worklow and enable us to produce high-quality design assets. I came up with the name: “Design Simplified”, which was a play on On Q Financial’s slogan: “Mortgages Simplified”. Design Simplified was completed with the following features:

  • Overhaul of request process
  • Asset library
  • Modular asset assembly system
  • Documentation

Creative Request Form

One aspect of our current system that was lacking was the Creative Request Form (CRF). This form was a PDF that was completed by Mortgage Consultants or marketing personnel based on the needs of the in-house client. A problem that we were facing was incomplete or inconsistent design specifications on the request forms. Even a small incorrect detail on a request could lead to hours of wasted efforts if a redesign was required.

By using Adobe InDesign and Acrobat, I overhauled the capabilities of the Creative Request Form. I learned the Adobe Acrobat JavaScript API documentation, and used it to add interactive elements to the PDF. Fields could be disabled or auto-completed based on user input so that the requester could focus on content instead of design-related minutia. This resulted in a drastic reduction of incorrect design specifications, which saved us many valuable hours of work. I also incorporated the ability to export the CRF’s content to a Comma Separated Values (.CSV) file format, which would prove useful for other aspects of the design system.

Asset Library

The bulk of the work completed for Design Simplified was revamping our template library. The other designers on my team and myself worked diligently to create a myriad of design assets across both print and digital platforms. We needed to ensure that they looked great while staying consistent with On Q Financial’s visual brand identity.

In addition to creating ready to go templates, I also created a system for assembling template modules. These modules are self-contained “chunks”, which could be combined in a variety of ways to rapidly create a new template or design asset based on the individual needs of the client. These modules followed a specific sizing pattern based on the asset type to ensure that they could be replaced as needed without any redesign necessary.

A new feature we also implemented in the assets was InDesign’s merge tag feature. Merge tags allow members of the team to export .CSV data from the Creative Request Form, which is then imported into the InDesign document. The imported data then auto-populates the corresponding merge tags inside the document. This reduced the need for excessive copying and pasting, and instead required slight additional reformatting of the text when needed.

Documentation

A design system without documentation is just an asset library. We needed to ensure that current and future members of our team were well aware of the capabilities of the design system, and the best practices for using it efficiently. We compiled a user manual that featured all of the various sizing requirements, and how to ensure consistent creation and maintenance of visual assets moving forward. We also outlined the various processes and created reference material to assist with carrying out those processes. My team was extremely supportive of the new system, and it was an awesome chance for us to work together and improve our output as a team. I couldn’t have made it happen without their valuable contributions.