How the best creatives are really psychologists who can design

When I left McCann, I spent some time freelancing in different agencies before starting Chocolate.

One of the most formative experiences from that period was working with Gareth Coombs and Sean Moore, who ran the Cambridge Strategy Centre.

Early on, I found myself in a brainstorming session for new product development with Whitbread, in a place called The Tardis underneath Farringdon railway station.

It was an extraordinary room.

More than 30 people around a table, throwing ideas around based on our collective knowledge of culture, design, trends, technology and consumers.

There were client teams, project managers, designers, art directors, scientists, strategists and all sorts of other specialists.

And two psychologists.

I couldn’t work out why.

So I asked.

The answer has stayed with me ever since.

Psychology – the understanding of how people think, feel and behave – is at the heart of effective communication.

If you understand how people respond to things, you can make more informed decisions about what to say, how to say it and how to make someone act.

That sounds obvious.

But it’s something that is surprisingly easy to forget when we get caught up in the creative process.

Great design isn’t simply about making something look good.

Colour, typography, imagery, language, composition, tone and even the order in which information is presented all create cues. They can reassure, excite, challenge, simplify, create desire or build trust.

And the better we understand the audience, the more deliberately we can use those cues.

It’s also why we personify brands.

If we think of a brand as a person, we can give it a personality that our audience will recognise and want to spend time with.

How would it speak?
What would it wear?
Would you trust it?
Would you want to have a conversation with it?
Would you choose it over someone else?

Those questions can lead to much better creative decisions than simply asking, “What should the logo look like?”

This is why I find the psychology behind communication more fascinating than the design process itself.

At Chocolate Ltd, we try to spend as much time as possible at the beginning of a project understanding the people we’re trying to influence.

Because the creative idea shouldn’t start with what we want to say.

It should start with what they need to hear, see and feel.

The best creatives aren’t just artists.
They’re psychologists who can design.

And that little lesson from The Tardis has influenced almost everything we’ve produced at Chocolate ever since.