Welcome, reader. We’re glad you’re here. Maybe you’re a brand-new client, excited and mildly anxious to be working with a new agency. Maybe this is your first expedition into the Lemonly blog, and you’re still trying to figure out exactly what we do. Maybe you’re starting a lemon orchard and some wayward Googling led you to us. Regardless, get ready for a crash course in one of our favorite topics — the Lemonly process.

We love turning your lemons into lemonade (it’s a metaphor, orchard person). To make sure our clients get the ultimate Lemonly treatment from our first call to final files, we have a tried-and-true process designed for maximum satisfaction and exceptional efficiency.

We love it; you love it. It goes a little something like this:

Scope of work

To get started, you’ll meet with a member of our stellar sales team to talk about your communication challenges and the type of visual content you want to create (or we can help you figure that out). 

Together, we’ll nail down just the right piece(s) of content to achieve your goals, whether it’s an infographic, an explainer video, an interactive, or any of our other specialties. We’ll send over a bespoke project proposal or scope of work (SOW) for you to review and sign off on. Once you accept the SOW digitally, it’s go time!

Ingredients

You’re ready to get rolling on your project with Lemonly. Excellent! We’ll send over our getting-started questions, known fondly as Ingredients. These are very important. Think of Ingredients as your project’s creative brief.

We ask you about your audience, the purpose of your project, the key points you need to hit, how you plan to share the finished project, inspiration or examples of visual content you like, your brand guidelines, and more. Depending on your project, these may require input from a few different people on your end to answer them all.

We promise it’s worth it! Your thoughtful responses now help set a clear vision for the project and answer a lot of questions that might come up later. Just like in the kitchen, concocting a delicious entree of sweet visuals starts with gathering the right ingredients.

Kickoff call

Next, your sales contact introduces you to your dedicated account executive — your main point of contact from here on out — and we’ll schedule a kickoff call via Zoom. Behind the scenes, your account exec selects members of our creative crew to work on your project.

Then comes kickoff time. You get your team in a huddle, we get ours, and we all hop on a video call to go through a few things: introductions, project overview, a two-way Q&A, and some explanations of our process and project timeline. Everybody good? Ready, break!

(Note: If we’re working together on a Brainsqueeze or branding project, your kickoff or discovery call might look a little different. Those types of projects are just as fun as our typical visual content projects, but they require more discussion and information-gathering in the early phases.)

Content

Like a strategic sponge, your Lemonly copywriter absorbs the various background information, key points, and resources you oh-so-kindly shared in your Ingredients answers. We then provide you with a draft of your project’s copy (the written content for your infographic, video, etc.). You pass it around to the relevant stakeholders on your end, agree on feedback, and hand it back to us to make edits, if applicable.

If you already have a copy draft put together, one of our copywriters will give it a quick once-over, maybe reformat a few things to make life easier on our designer, make sure that’s cool with you, and off it goes to the next phase.

It’s important to make sure copy is nailed down before we move on to the wireframe and moodboard phase. Finalizing copy in this phase helps keep your project on schedule and prevents rework later on. Plus, reviewing a copy doc is just as exciting as checking out the first design draft, right!?

(Disclaimer: The content team runs the blog and may be slightly biased about how great the copy phase is.)

Wireframe + Moodboard

What are they? How do we present them?

The wireframe is essentially a blueprint (er, grayprint?) of a project’s layout. It shows how your designer plans to place the written content created in the copy phase, and it includes descriptions of planned illustrations. In this phase, we’ll make sure you dig the text hierarchy and layout. Don’t look for color, graphics, or icons in the wireframe. You shall find none.

(For video projects, sketch storyboards take the place of a wireframe. Same idea — grayscale, lo-fi elements showing the placement of objects in the frame — but you’ll see each frame paired with the corresponding segment of the video script.)

You will find stuff like color, graphics, and icons in the moodboard. This collage-style piece shows you the color palette, fonts, and illustration styles we’re planning for your project. If you have brand guidelines, you’ll see them reflected in the moodboard.

Still have questions? Fear not. Your Lemonly designer and account exec will get on a call with you to walk through the wireframe and moodboard to make sure you understand what you’re seeing and why the designer made the choices they did.

After the wireframe and moodboard are approved…

Design

Ta-da! We bring together the approved copy and layout from the wireframe with the creative elements from the moodboard in the design phase to create a fully designed, bespoke infographic. Isn’t it lovely? (For video projects, you’ll see design storyboards in this phase.)

As with the other phases, you’ll have up to two rounds of edits to make sure your design is everything you dreamed of.

If your project is static (not animated or interactive), you’re just about done! Skip down to delivery. Otherwise, we’ve got just a little further to go. Trust us, the final product is well worth the journey.

Animation

If your project is animated (like an explainer video or an animated infographic), now’s the time when we make things move. During animation, our motion designers work their magic to bring your project to life.

We’ll share an animation draft for review so you can check out the movement and note any final feedback.

Development

If your project is interactive (like a microsite, quiz, or other extra-special web experience), development is the last phase of production. We’ll work with talented developers to add interactivity, responsiveness, or other functionality included in the scope of work.

We’ll send over a link to a staging site to check out your project in its final form. That’s the time to check that all the interactive elements are clicking away smoothly. Depending on whether you or Lemonly are hosting your interactive once it’s live, we’ll send over final dev files for you to implement or launch it for you.

Delivery

And just like that, we’re all done! After we get the final thumbs-up from your team, we’ll package up the final files for your project and send ‘em over in a handy-dandy Dropbox link. We’ll also send the working files if they’re included in your scope of work.

Remember to reach out with any questions about the best ways to publish and promote your infographic.

And of course, let us know when you’re ready to start talking about the next story you want to tell with sweet visuals.