Attempt To Explain: The Standards
Set them and follow through, What are your standards?
When your job is to express (and empower others with) creative agency, you need a structure. One that allows for inspiration and experience, freedom and discipline, experimentation and certainty.
So how do you set an expectation for only the highest level without creating a crippling fear of failure? How do you set up a process that allows for different interpretations and work styles? What’s a consistent approach that encourages everyone to raise their game while ensuring they enjoy playing? Our reckon is that you need to set Standards and then improvise around them, sound jazzy? It’s meant to. Let us Attempt to Explain: The Standards.
Strategy
Without a definition, brand strategy can be very slippery. What does it look like, how is it delivered, how can it be used? Without a good explanation, the answers are often waffly at best. Something so important should be codified– we’re convinced that a Brand is a Meme. It’s a powerful idea that can be chosen, interpreted and shared. Like a gene, it is introduced into an environment and provided it’s potential to replicate ends up dominating that environment.
We want to deliver a client something that is both distinct and didactic. And to do that, we can follow some basic principles that allow the value of a brand to be articulated. Our Standards take this into account. Every brand we work on has a Purpose, Proposition, Plan of Attack and Flywheel– an interconnected set of deliverables that play a part in bringing a brand’s vision into reality.
Similarly to our design team, strategy has a set of Standard Operating Procedures that quality assure all of our work and ensure that everything that’s delivered serves as instructive materials for both clients and designers to interpret.
These Standards encompass basic hygiene in Figma, Coda and Asana, critically assessing and peer reviewing work with an epistemic confidence rating for each part. Further to that, a brand strategy should be in dialogue with those working through it, so a central part of our process is how we can invite designers and clients into the strategy such that they can use and provide feedback on it’s strengths and weaknesses. By setting a standard by which strategy is created, it can be measured, improved and understood by anyone working with it.
Delivery
Our work is guided by a set of principles and best practices known as The Standards™. Rather than defining us as a creative agency, these standards serve as a robust framework that elevates our work and are resonant with the team. They act as a reliable reference point, informing our decision-making processes, approach to design, dev, client collaborations, and delivery.
In the Delivery phase, The Standards™ play a crucial role everyday at LAM. Providing a clear roadmap and a shared language that ensures consistency across our platforms and excellence in our deliverables. By adhering to these standards the delivery team maintains quality, speed and accuracy across executions. The Standards™ act as a compass, guiding us through, allowing us to produce work that meets and exceeds expectations. Holding this central location makes space for innovation.
The influence of The Standards™ extends past production and design principles into communication strategies, client growth approaches, and ethical considerations. By codifying our processes into living systems we can quickly embrace feedback, iterate, and remain open to adaptation. Its a powerful differentiator. We sit within a dynamic and vibrant space where ideas, norms, and trends rapidly spread and evolve. Consequently, as an agency we must also constantly iterate, evolve, and adapt to the forces and demands of the market. Having our base framework supports us to work quicker.
The Standards™ are not a defining doctrine but rather a guiding structure that empowers us to push boundaries, explore new ideas, and strive for continuous improvement while delivering exceptional work. They shape our production processes, ensuring consistency and excellence in our deliverables, while also serving as a powerful tool in our sales efforts to foster client growth. Our fidelity to The Standards™ is real.
Development Team
If you’re a developer reading this, you might be thinking: “Wait, isn’t this just documentation?”. And in a way it is. Documentation of process, of cadence, of vision.
So it makes sense that we have our own special sub-section within The Standards™ dedicated to more dev-specific knowledge. It’s called the Nerd Docs™ and it’s where we save all our technical Hows, Whats and Whys. We’re constantly scoping out new features for projects, and this serves as a library of the tools in our belt, and detailed instructions on how best to use them.
Recently we went down a rabbit-hole exploring how to implement cross-browser transparent video.
Two years later and this is sadly still the case
The approach we landed on involves using the notoriously fiddly ffmpeg to generate a .mov encoded to support alpha channels from exported PNGs. The command for this is:
ffmpeg -framerate 25 -i SOMETHING%3d.png -c:v prores_ks -pix_fmt yuva444p10le -alpha_bits 16 -profile:v 4444 -f mov -vframes 150 OUTPUT.mov
Scary stuff. But now that this is ✨ documented ✨, future me can rest easy.
Writing the perfect How To guide for a complex procedure can sometimes feel like speedrunning: the goal is to achieve the shortest route between A and B, and this is refined over time through practice and iteration. These are written by us and for us, so we put a lot of effort into making them as clear and engaging as possible. These docs aren’t static files either - our guide on spinning up new projects from our templates is constantly evolving as we iterate, test and evaluate our processes.
The reality is it can feel tedious writing about what you’re doing rather than doing the thing itself. But what’s far more tedious is trying to re-engineer a problem you’ve already solved. The Nerd Docs™ are a living breathing collection of the myriad tricks up our sleeves.
Design Team
The pursuit of balance between structure and freedom in the creative process is a delicate yet crucial endeavour, as surmised within the ‘Why Standards?’ section of the Standards. But the Standards achieves just that, a ✨ delicate balance ✨
Put simply, the Standards is LAM’s equivalent of what song lyric displays and vocal cue prompts are for karaoke goers; a guide for the team to align with the melody (creative process). I.e. it provides us a shared structure and a set of minimum expectations for everyone to follow in order to contribute effectively. It outlines defined frameworks, concepts and all other necessary information we need to create, collaborate and support each other, while still allowing our individual interpretations and the freedom to elevate and experiment. Basically, our reliance on the Standards is essential, especially if we want to avoid dissonant experiences. See what I did there? *wink*
So how is it actually used by the design team? It’s essentially an online index of checklists, SOP’s, explanations, templates, and so much more. Seriously, you open one page and it just expands into a vast network of sub-pages and sub-sub-pages. We’ve got checklists and SOP’s from design to dispatch. Whatever you need it’s in the Standards.When I started interning at LAM, the standards gave me an exact idea of what I needed to know and do in order to (seamlessly) get in and get to fucking work.
No more no less. It was (and still is) my trusted companion. My compass for when I get lost in the world of LAM and its acronyms, philosophies and trademarks. My irreplaceable work bestie.And finally, the other thing about the Standards is that we all know everything in there works, or in theory should work. It’s an index of proven know-how that we leverage to collaborate on work that works.
In the coming weeks we’ll be publishing our Standards on our website so get it bookmarked! In the meantime let us know what Standards you set that allow your organisation to exercise its agency. Get in the comments.
Attempt To Explain
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