I’m the DJ, he’s the rapper
Under Armchair Pt. 1
A big part of Armchair’s success is the collaboration between strategy and design. At their best, our projects come together as a unified vision between business, functional and design aspects, backed by progressive technology and meticulous project management.
This level of collaboration is natural to us, and almost mandated since we have two strategists and a creative director as three of our four partners.
As Armchair continues to grow, we fight against any processes resembling a waterfall model. We form teams and we involve each member up-front in the project life cycle, many times during business development and always in concepting. The right people have to be in place to make this work, and we recruit and hire strong individual thinkers who find pleasure in building off others.
This approach hasn’t always been easy to pull off. At times, tight deadlines and workload issues may force a deliverable that hasn’t been completely vetted by the team. But advances in our process (thanks in a big way to our PM team) has put structure in place to formalize a way of working that started organically, back when Armchair was five people working out of Scott’s living room.
Kenny Ferguson is an Armchair partner and senior strategist
Comments:
You’re Chuck D, I’m Flava Flav.
I find that I design best when I’ve had contact with a project and even the client at the earlier strategic phases. The more connection I have to a project’s life cycle, the more in tune I am with finding a design’s solution(s). I also believe that connection fosters more interest in the success of a project. If I’ve seen it at every point up until now, I’m more likely to be excited about the final outcome.