Last week we co-sponsored Noisy Little Monkey’s bi-annual Digital Gaggle event alongside the brilliant Henry Nicholas, KASK, Launch, Modular Digital, Somerset Design and T&S. We loved seeing some familiar faces and meeting loads of new and brilliant industry bods from the West Country, and beyond.

Between the fantastic speakers and the conversations at our very own Soap stand, it was such a thought provoking event. So, instead of sharing our highlights or even attempting to summarise all of the incredible expertise the speakers shared, here we round up the top five (of many) questions that we are asking ourselves. Even if we haven’t quite found the answers to all of them, yet:

1. How can we help our clients to optimise brand consistency for visual search?

If visual search is the future of search and brand consistency is key to winning at visual search, in our position as brand guardians we need to be optimising our designs to be as appealing to visual search technologies as possible. We loved the numerous examples (and selfies) that WIX’s Head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter, shared in her talk to demonstrate this.

2. How can we design event collateral that helps Google to recognise our clients’ brands in visual search?

From signage to roller banners and just about everything in between, we design a lot of event collateral and it was interesting to see what Google could, and perhaps more crucially could not, interpret on photos from events. On this point, Carter has got us thinking about upcoming events from a fresh perspective.

3. How can we make the more mundane parts of our jobs more efficient so we can spend more time and energy on the brilliant, creative bits we love?

Because, as we learned from Noisy Little Monkey’s very own Andy Thornton, our time is valuable – and so are we! His uplifting talk was packed with timesaving tips that we will be cherry picking and putting into action shortly, so we can focus on doing what we do best: creating.

4. Can we be more mindful about the ethics of the data tech our campaigns use?

As designers we don’t really get into the nitty gritty of data capture and analytics but our designs are often part of digital campaigns. So how can we advocate for human beings and, as Rowenna Fielding of Miss IG Geek put it, “not be a git”?

5. How can we apply the ‘mad scientist’ approach to our creative process?

Apart from being hilarious, the talk by Monzo’s Social Media Manager, Richard Cook, rounded off the event with an interesting challenge. His scientific approach of hypothesis forming, experimenting, measuring and refining content works perfectly for organic marketing, but got us thinking about how we can apply that to our design process to get the best results. Watch this space!

What did you take away from this year’s Digital Gaggle? What changes will you make to how you work as a result of the event?