Creativity in medcomms – friend or foe?
You may not consider medical communications and creativity to be closely associated with one another; however, there is a surprising correlation between the two. Creativity is a linchpin of graphic design, which plays an important role in visually communicating scientific information and data.
Working as a Junior Graphic Designer at InterComm, I have had my first experiences in the world of MedComms, and it is not what I thought it would be. I had anticipated hours of mindless data inputting between hundreds of lines of text, over and over – happily this could not be further from the truth. In fact, every day offers different opportunities and challenges.
As an agency, we work with a wide range of clients who each have their own unique brand guidelines that we must follow. This does mean that some elements of our work are prescriptive, as we are required to design within the parameters of clients’ existing brand colours, fonts and styling. Although we always keep the client’s requirements in mind, we try to enhance the materials using our creativity, and this is something that our clients praise us for. The strictness of adhering to original brand formats also varies depending on the client and the content of each project, meaning we often have the chance to use our own creative freedom, with clients asking us ‘how can you make this more visual?’ or ‘see what you can do with it’.
The range of materials is another aspect of design that keeps us on our toes; we love working on new projects and find ourselves continually researching and introducing new materials to our portfolio.
Of course, we do have some projects with well-established clients where we use the same styling for almost every project, but we also have one-offs and more unique projects such as videos, animations and congresses. Here we have the opportunity to create multiple design elements which come together to create a complete and cohesive set of materials for the client’s approval. Even with the projects we know well, a certain element of creativity is involved as we must use our designer eye for detail to ensure all elements meet the brief and our clients are completely satisfied with the results.
Personally, I enjoy and embrace the challenge of keeping to brand guidelines and briefs, but also using my skills to add my own subtle twist to the work. MedComms is unique, in that we must use our design skills to elevate the projects we work on whilst always keeping the client’s requirements and the purpose of the project in mind; every material we produce must be clear, legible and informative to have maximum impact.
I love my work; my logical brain appreciates the prescriptive nature of it, but my creative brain loves the freedom to do my absolute best to ensure a positive outcome for the client.
