TORONTO—Educating colleagues on what design departments actually do is still a major challenge for in-house designers, according to a panel moderated by RGD Ontario president Lionel Gadoury last Thursday.

A group of in-house designers gathered at the Drake Hotel in Toronto to hear panelists Tammy Barrett of Carleton Cards, Noemi Chellew of John Hancock Retirement Plan Services, Natalie Coombs of Ernst & Young, and Michael MacVicar of Capital One discuss issues facing internal design groups.

“They understand and value what we do to a certain point,” says Chellew, art director, graphic design services at John Hancock Retirement Plan Services. “They are concerned with their own timelines and we still have to educate and negotiate design requirements and timelines.”

Tammy Barrett, senior manager of marketing and trade development at Carlton Cards, agrees that non-design colleagues often have unrealistic timelines for design work. “Our biggest challenge is with the sales group. They don’t understand the value and time required… We send them a schedule to explain what can be done in a certain timeframe.” 

Another bugaboo for in-house designers is revisions, which can become incredibly time consuming and costly. Some internal design departments have switched to a charge-back model in hopes of cutting down on the amount of revision requests from other departments by charging for each change. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case for Ernst & Young.

“We now use a charge back model to stop all of these revisions but it hasn’t changed,” says Coombs, senior graphic designer of creative services at Ernst & Young. “They don’t care how much it costs. I prefer the none charge-back model because then you can just design and not worry about all of the admin stuff.” Contact: www.rgdontario.com