Mise en place: smart prep is your deadline lifeline

Ask any chef how they get through a packed Saturday night with their sanity intact, and they’ll tell you what happened long before the first order came in: mise en place. Ingredients measured, chopped, and ready to go — so when the tickets start flying, they can just cook.

Production design under a tight deadline can run the same way. The difference between a calm push and a chaotic one usually comes down to proper prep. Knowing which parts of the work to do when, and making sure the team is aligned and ready.

For the past few years, we’ve designed research reports for a leading beauty company. Four reports, four teams with multiple stakeholders, hundreds of slides, and deadlines that leap-frog each other. Tons of content, lots of data, tight timing.

We hit the deadlines and turn out work that makes the client teams look great because we prepare well before the crunch.

Get clear on the goal.

The first prep step isn’t visual at all. It’s taking the time to get clear on what’s needed, so you can devise an approach that serves it.

For the beauty reports, that meant we needed to understand the client’s communication goals, and help translate what that means for the reports. How we could we make all four teams look unified and provide reports that serve the varying needs of internal audiences — and at the same time, reflect an elevated and cohesive creative direction?

After taking the client through a discovery phase, we uncovered the commonalities and differences across the needs of different product categories, and how to solve for them. We got their buy-in on a magazine style with a family look that has the right level of consistency plus flexibility to create memorable and useful reports.

When you get clear on functional requirements and unite your team around the shared outcome that you’re cooking toward, every decision gets easier. You’re not guessing. You’re executing against a well-defined, shared goal.

This phase takes time, but as one team member commented, sometimes you have to slow down to move fast.

The ability to remain calm and focused in stressful situations is central to making positive decisions.
— Goldie Hawn

Set the story and design vision before crunch time.

Here’s the part we see many teams skip when they’re rushed: they start building real slides before they’re clear on the overall story and how it should flow. It may feel productive to jump in, but it doesn’t save time.

Long before the final copy and data are available, prep can happen on two levels.

To prep a clear story, we always recommend getting to rough draft sooner. An iterative approach, with team work sessions, lets everyone involved evaluate if the story makes sense from section to section, and slide to slide. Does it tell our audiences what they need to know, what needs more detail, what can be streamlined, and what can go? This helps establish a clear, useful story line before getting too deep into content, data, and design details.

To prep visually, we develop design studies. This helps people see how the story will be expressed, and know that they have all the visual ingredients needed. Simple moodboards capture a distinct tone: photo styles, color palettes, styles for data visualization, and how all the elements can adapt from one category to the next. Developing a well-reasoned direction and kit of parts (ingredients) means we won’t be making big aesthetic decisions under deadline.

This brings everyone through the process together. Your shared project goal begins to cascade down into specific report story goals. The client can see (and approve) where things are headed. This clarifies next steps and makes it less likely there will be unexpected curveballs later.

Build a system that reduces decision making.

This is where we start prepping ingredients. Once the overall direction is set, we translate it into a more detailed system. Slide templates with defined slide types, chart and table styles, color and type specs. Photo research to build image banks with primary and secondary images ready to go.

This is the prep that pays off once the final content comes in. The components are ready and when crunch time hits, production becomes assembly, not invention. Because the system is built to be flexible by category, we can create cohesion across the whole family with the right level of variation within it. We aren’t starting from scratch each time.

Fire it up.

One summer in college I was a server at a restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard. When a table finished their appetizers and I needed entrées, I’d say, “fire table 9.” I had no inkling how applicable that experience would be to overseeing deadlines for these kinds of projects.

When the final data and copy land, the design direction is set, the templates are built, the imagery is prepped. The ingredients are ready and it’s time for the push. We assemble our ingredients to create final work, expeditiously and at high quality, because the thinking is already done.

Bottom line

Great work on a tight timeline isn’t about moving faster under pressure. It’s about doing the right work earlier: getting clear on the goal, setting the vision, and building a flexible system before crunch time. Prep well, and the deadline takes care of itself. The work stays high-quality, life stays sane, and the customer is happy.

Do you have an important project with a timeline that scares you a little?

Header photo: Joy’s mise en place—ingredients prepared to make kolokithokeftedes (Greek zucchini fritters)
Images © Stauber Studio