A brief note – The importance of a brief

As an agency designer, you can end up wearing many hats. You learn and build upon your skills and gain insight through the vast range of projects that can come into the studio. Needless to say, you learn many things, but one thing you never become is a wizard. From a design perspective, a brief is a bit of a grey area as there are no set rules. We don’t want a rendition of War & Peace but we also don’t want a 3 line Haiku.

Why a design brief is important?

So we’re on board and invested in the project. We can’t wait to start. We open the task and read a mysterious brief and cautiously begin to design half concerned you’ll hate it.

A brief, as we all know, gives all parties a clear vision and creates the boundaries before any work commences for new or current clients and saves a whole lot of passive aggressive emails. In essence, we don’t know your vision.

What are the main points to include?

Description:  A little bit about the project, the beauty of an agency is the breadth of experience and fresh ideas we can bring. Sadly we’re not your personal in-house design team so haven’t been in your internal meetings – is it a new branding project, redesign, website or even re-working some current pieces.

Assets: Give us anything we can work with. We’d prefer not to try and hunt down your logo via google to realise it’s so pixelated it could be used to conceal someone’s identity. Basically apply the phone, wallet, keys phrase but swap in logo, font and colour palette (if it’s relevant of course).

Flexibility: To summarise – how much trust do you have and how adventurous are you feeling?

Is there anything you like: The internet is a modern day universe and the things you love and loathe could contrast to your designer’s opinion.

A project is sometimes like dating and there’s no time for mixed signals! We want to make it work and communication is key.