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Every project should start with a project brief. But it often doesn't.
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A project brief or a design brief is sort of a plan of the project.
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It's sort of a guide and agreement between two parties, that you're gonna move into a certain direction.
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And you're going to get this certain result.
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There are different ways to go through and create project briefs.
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But I have sort of my own way because I don't find an official and kind of industry adopted ways
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to be very useful. Because they are very big,
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too much information you need, and very.. not very sort of relevant to everyday businesses and everyday
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real-life scenarios, like freelancing on Upwork and sending some information to somebody across the
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continents. And not very useful for small projects. May be useful for ginormous corporations and
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that's how they define the project brief because it has to go through committees, and board of directors
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that sort of stuff. But when I'm working mainly with small startups, and entrepreneurs, and smaller
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companies, they don't need any of that.
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Their primary concern is time and money, and to get to the project and get through it as fast as possible.
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So for me, project brief is basically answers to certain questions, that I need to know. And these are
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questions that I ask on the kickoff meetings. So I have an initial meeting with my clients, and we discuss
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something there, and I have some questions prepared for them.
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I ask them these questions and they give me answers and then at the end of the meeting I sort of draw
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a project brief out of this meeting.
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Basically answering the same questions on the paper, send it to them so they can agree that I didn't
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misunderstand something or maybe we had a miscommunication. The two most important questions
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that I ask,
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is "What's the goal of the website?" and "Who is it for?"
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You can't really design a solution to a problem, before you know what's the problem it's trying to solve.
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You need to know target audience and who is going to be using this website.
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A website for a young crowd in their 20s is going to look a little different than a website for corporate
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managers in their 40s and 50s.
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For our project, I already have prepared a design brief. And it's a template that I created from my own
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design brief that I use. And you can use it for your projects, take it and save it.
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Here's what you can do with it. When you get to a meeting, a chat or email conversation with your client
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or an employer,
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keep this document by your side and ask these questions to them.
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You will later refine these questions and add more or remove some, to make it work for you.
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Once you're done with a meeting fill this out. You can do this during the meeting or later,
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no difference. Then exported it as PDF
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and send it to your client to double check if they agree.
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This will do 2 things.
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First, this is going to be a big help actually for your client. Because what often happens, is that my
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clients, don't know what they want.
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And this is something that you wouldn't expect. But they do know that they want a website,
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but often they don't know why exactly they want the website,
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what sort of website they want. And they have many different ideas,
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and this is very common with entrepreneurs. Because a lot of interpreters they are in their head and
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there is just a million different ideas, just buzzing in their head, and they're excited about everything,
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and they have trouble to structure their idea, and structure their mind in a proper way. By going through
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these questions and answers and then reading them
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this later in the design brief format, you give them the ability to create clarity in their head,
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so both of you are on the same page.
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The second thing that's going to happen, is that you will appear more professional.
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This shows that you know what you're doing and I have a specific system in place. Because of this clients
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will trust you on your designs more.
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They will have better experience at the end of the day, because they will get what they actually wanted,
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because they trust your designs now, and they will be happier with the results meaning they will share
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it with their friends who are often entrepreneurs themselves, bringing you more clients and more work.
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All right.
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So I have already filled out this brief.
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Let's imagine that we already had a meeting with our client and we have agreed on this brief.
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Our client is a startup that is building a team collaboration platform.
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The goal of this side is to sign up users for early access.
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This means the platform is and ready yet,
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but the company wants to market already and generate interest.
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This is common practice with startups, to have websites during their development process, or whenever
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they are building their product. Because that way they can generate some interest. Because they go around
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looking for investors or try to get PR and media exposure. So they always need the website often before
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they even have a product.
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The target audience of this website is other startups and teams, that have employees working from different
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locations. Client wants a modern website using photography instead of illustrations and with
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a clean minimalistic look.
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The website is going to have a blog.
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This means we're going to build this a CMS. And it's going to need to collect form submissions.
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That's it.
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That's how simple the project brief should be.
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It's called brief, isn't it?
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So make it short and sweet.