First of All What is a Design Brief?
A design brief is information that you give to your logo or graphic designer - it explains to them what you want to achieve from the project (logo design, or any other design project for that matter), and acts as a reference for the designer to work from.

Design briefs save time and money because they reduce the risk of the designer misinterpreting your needs and the resultant multiple design revisions or new concepts that can arise from this.

In today’s age of ‘logo design factories’ it’s not uncommon to expect 10 logo design concepts to be thrown at you but a good logo designer working from a detailed brief shouldn’t need to create anywhere that number of concepts before they ‘get it right’.

Who Compiles the Brief?
I feel that it is the designer that is experienced in this area, it is their duty to ask you the right questions and to compile the brief that way rather than expecting the client to provide the right information off their own back. The client is experienced in their own area of business; that isn’t the business of design and so they may not understand what sort of information they should be providing.

However, having said that, I’m very aware that many designers do work from nothing more than what the client decides to give them, with no further questioning of their own.

So in the absence of questions from your designer, what sort of information should you be giving them about your business and design needs to improve your chances of them developing a fantastic design for you?

5 IMPORTANT DESIGN BRIEF QUESTIONS

Detailed Business Information
Your designer needs to know more about your business than just your industry. Try to tell them a bit about how you operate (or in the case of start-ups how you intend to operate), what sort of products and/or services you will offer your customers, and in what way you intend to market yourself to those customers.

Target Market
One of the, if not the most important question of all. How can a designer ensure that your business identity or marketing message (in the case of other design services such as print design for example or web design) appeals to your customers if they don’t know who your customers are?!

Tell your designer what sort of customer will be buying your products and/or services and where or how they will buy them.

Your Competitors
It can be useful to outline some of your competitors and give your designer a link to their website.

USP
What is your unique selling point? What will set you apart from your competitors? What are you offering that is better/different from them? If you can explain this, along with any other brand ethos you plan to live by, your designer is better positioned to ensure your designs project that image and visually ’sell’ your USP.

Taglines
Tell your designer before they start if there is a tagline that must be included in their brand design.

Depending on the design it can sometimes be a nightmare to add in a tagline later on to a design that wasn’t created with spacing for a tagline in mind and you don’t want a great design looking as though it has had one ‘tagged on’ (excuse my pun! ha ha) as an afterthought do you?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Design Inspiration, Thoughts on Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.