Every project should start with a project brief. But it often doesn't. 1
A project brief or a design brief is sort of a plan of the project. 2
It's sort of a guide and agreement between two parties, that you're gonna move into a certain direction. 3
And you're going to get this certain result. 4
There are different ways to go through and create project briefs. 5
But I have sort of my own way because I don't find an official and kind of industry adopted ways 6
to be very useful. Because they are very big, 7
too much information you need, and very.. not very sort of relevant to everyday businesses and everyday 8
real-life scenarios, like freelancing on Upwork and sending some information to somebody across the 9
continents. And not very useful for small projects. May be useful for ginormous corporations and 10
that's how they define the project brief because it has to go through committees, and board of directors 11
that sort of stuff. But when I'm working mainly with small startups, and entrepreneurs, and smaller 12
companies, they don't need any of that. 13
Their primary concern is time and money, and to get to the project and get through it as fast as possible. 14
So for me, project brief is basically answers to certain questions, that I need to know. And these are 15
questions that I ask on the kickoff meetings. So I have an initial meeting with my clients, and we discuss 16
something there, and I have some questions prepared for them. 17
I ask them these questions and they give me answers and then at the end of the meeting I sort of draw 18
a project brief out of this meeting. 19
Basically answering the same questions on the paper, send it to them so they can agree that I didn't 20
misunderstand something or maybe we had a miscommunication. The two most important questions 21
that I ask, 22
is "What's the goal of the website?" and "Who is it for?" 23
You can't really design a solution to a problem, before you know what's the problem it's trying to solve. 24
You need to know target audience and who is going to be using this website. 25
A website for a young crowd in their 20s is going to look a little different than a website for corporate 26
managers in their 40s and 50s. 27
For our project, I already have prepared a design brief. And it's a template that I created from my own 28
design brief that I use. And you can use it for your projects, take it and save it. 29
Here's what you can do with it. When you get to a meeting, a chat or email conversation with your client 30
or an employer, 31
keep this document by your side and ask these questions to them. 32
You will later refine these questions and add more or remove some, to make it work for you. 33
Once you're done with a meeting fill this out. You can do this during the meeting or later, 34
no difference. Then exported it as PDF 35
and send it to your client to double check if they agree. 36
This will do 2 things. 37
First, this is going to be a big help actually for your client. Because what often happens, is that my 38
clients, don't know what they want. 39
And this is something that you wouldn't expect. But they do know that they want a website, 40
but often they don't know why exactly they want the website, 41
what sort of website they want. And they have many different ideas, 42
and this is very common with entrepreneurs. Because a lot of interpreters they are in their head and 43
there is just a million different ideas, just buzzing in their head, and they're excited about everything, 44
and they have trouble to structure their idea, and structure their mind in a proper way. By going through 45
these questions and answers and then reading them 46
this later in the design brief format, you give them the ability to create clarity in their head, 47
so both of you are on the same page. 48
The second thing that's going to happen, is that you will appear more professional. 49
This shows that you know what you're doing and I have a specific system in place. Because of this clients 50
will trust you on your designs more. 51
They will have better experience at the end of the day, because they will get what they actually wanted, 52
because they trust your designs now, and they will be happier with the results meaning they will share 53
it with their friends who are often entrepreneurs themselves, bringing you more clients and more work. 54
All right. 55
So I have already filled out this brief. 56
Let's imagine that we already had a meeting with our client and we have agreed on this brief. 57
Our client is a startup that is building a team collaboration platform. 58
The goal of this side is to sign up users for early access. 59
This means the platform is and ready yet, 60
but the company wants to market already and generate interest. 61
This is common practice with startups, to have websites during their development process, or whenever 62
they are building their product. Because that way they can generate some interest. Because they go around 63
looking for investors or try to get PR and media exposure. So they always need the website often before 64
they even have a product. 65
The target audience of this website is other startups and teams, that have employees working from different 66
locations. Client wants a modern website using photography instead of illustrations and with 67
a clean minimalistic look. 68
The website is going to have a blog. 69
This means we're going to build this a CMS. And it's going to need to collect form submissions. 70
That's it. 71
That's how simple the project brief should be. 72
It's called brief, isn't it? 73
So make it short and sweet.