My, your briefs are beautiful

Nobody likes ill-fitting briefs, lets be honest they’re just plain uncomfortable. If your briefs are carefully tailored however they’re bound to fit you perfectly. And a perfect brief will almost always lead to a successful creative campaign. It’s the old adage rubbish in, rubbish out. So when we asked our design team for their top tips on what they’d love you to include in your small but perfectly formed briefing documents this is what they said:

1. Assume nothing, tell us everything. Nobody knows your business like you do. You're the best-placed person to know what your brand wants to achieve, or who your competitors are, or what design directions have been tried and failed in the past, or what you personally like and what you can't stand. Depending on the scope of the project, include as much relevant background detail as you can – samples of previously printed material or the addresses of websites you admire.

2. Get us inside the head of your target audience. Seeing your offering from their perspective, what are their influences, biases, preferences and needs. How do they see you and how do you compare to your competitors. Use friends or family to really help you ‘see’ your business from a more neutral perspective. Audit your customers experience, how do they want to be communicated to.

3. Define your call-to-action. What exactly do you want readers to do? Visit a website? Phone for more information? Take advantage of a special offer? Save the date? Eat at your restaurant on Fridays? Or is it simply more of a brand-building piece, designed to inform, educate or boost awareness of your name so they remember it next time they see it?

4. It's all about the 'what', not about the 'how'. Design is creative problem solving and the main purpose of the brief is to accurately define the problem. Some times it gets tempting to try and find the solution while writing the brief in the hope of saving time and money. However this can lead to very prescriptive set of instructions that may not necessarily get to the nub of the issue and will most likely restrict or narrow the designers creative thinking. Thus the focus of the perfect brief is the what, and not the how.

Be great to hear what briefing tips have worked well for you?