• design philosophy
  
• globalization and localization
  
• the importance of visual design for applications
  
• typical process
  

Discover and Dream
Working in parallel with Tristream’s experience design group, business strategists, and technical advisors, the Creative Director gathers complete and accurate intel before "putting pencil to paper." These ideas and data are discovered in the kick-off meeting, user and stakeholder surveys, and "Blue Sky" workshops. Without this information it’s like designing in the dark. The results are the basis for the content of the Creative Design Brief.

The Creative Design Brief defines at a high level:

• The mood of the application or "Look & Feel" at a high level
  
• Specific corporate graphical guidelines, including fonts, logos, and any visual branding issues.
  
• Globalization issues
  
• Technical issues affecting visuals richness such as connection speed, and browser pixel dimensions
  
• Any color limitations the site will have
  
• What sort of "bells and whistles" are wanted (e.g., mouse-overs, animation, news feeds, multimedia, etc.)

Design
This is when Tristream magic happens. With the wire-frame illustrations developed by the Experience Design Group and creative brief as guides, the designer develops a set of comps for presentation and feedback purposes. Comps present to the stakeholders a number of visual options for their application solution in order to "prime the pump" of the creative process of arriving at a truly compelling visual design. An advantage of doing comps is to postpone the investment of the significantly more costly HTML prototypes until there is consensus on the specific graphical direction. This is a creative, highly collaborative, and iterative process.

Following approval of the visual comps by both internal and client side teams, the digital files are handed off to the builder for creating a HTML prototype. At this point in the visual design process the Creative Director has the responsibility to make sure the build accurately reflects the approved comps.