WORKING TO A BRIEF

Project Brief

These are extracts from briefs set as part of a student competition. Your task is to read and analyse them. Ask yourself:

• What are you being asked to do?

• How will the client will judge a successful outcome to the brief?

• What are the keywords?

In addition log any other questions you would want to ask the client.

Brief 1

Create packaging for Quaker’s new ‘Chilled Creamy Oats’ product for young women looking for a truly delicious healthy snack. The target audience is young women juggling many jobs and priorities everyday. They like to eat well but also love treats and hate feeling hungry. They like the idea of oats for their natural goodness but find the idea of eating them bland and unappealing.

Analysis of brief 1

Keywords

Young Women, Busy, Healthy, Delicious, Treats, Natural goodness, Bland, Unappealing

What are you being asked to do?

In this brief I am being asked to create new packaging for a new Quaker Oats product for busy young women. The women love treats and to eat well but the product design must not be bland or unappealing.

What the client wants the work you are doing to achieve?

The new product must appeal to young women who will want to pick up the new product. The product must be branded for its natural goodness, taste good and can be eaten as a healthy snack. The company will measure how successful the product is by how many products they sell.

Who your target audience is

The target audience is busy young women, this could be a mother or a young professional that has time constraints. These young busy women still care about their health but want a snack that is tasty and nutritious.

Where and how it will be reproduced

Quaker is looking to promote and market ‘Chilled Creamy Oats’. This indicates that this product will be found in the chilled section of a supermarket or shop.

What to ask the client

This client has been around since 1850 and specialises in oats. They are a large well-known company. I would ask them the following questions:

Being such a large company, do they have other competition, does the competition look similar to Quaker?
What tone or feel do they want to portray? Friendly, feminine, healthy or down to earth. What colours do they want to use? Fonts, photos, images etc...?
Deadline for initial ideas, proofs or artwork
Budget

Brief 2

Most of us have experienced a long rail journey – we witness the dramatic contrasts of the changing landscape, the inter-connections at various points along the way; various people embark and disembark; the dynamic is ever-changing... finally we reach our destination. This brief challenges you to take a metaphorical journey on the theme of connections. Explore the theme as broadly as possible and take us on a journey that might link, amongst other things – people, events, philosophies, theories, objects, movements, inventions, history, literature, etc. Your journey is only limited by your own imagination and the quality of your research – surprise us with the juxtaposition of your selected themes but be sure to communicate to the viewer the ‘connectedness’ of the thinking within your design. Define your market, and how you will target it.

Analysis of brief 2

Keywords

Rail, Journey, Landscape, Destination, Movement, History.

What are you being asked to do?

In this brief I am being asked to explore connections which can be as broad as possible to include links and connections to people, events, philosophies, theories, objects, movements, inventions, history, literature, etc.

What the client wants the work you are doing to achieve?

The client wants to communicate with travellers connectedness. I need to explore different themes.

Who your target audience is

The target audience has to be defined by myself. This is also a very broad brief as anyone who travels on rail is the target audience. This can be from very young children to the elderly.

Where and how it will be reproduced

This would be one of the questions that I would ask the client. As the train passes through various cities and towns there will be billboards at the on the platforms advertising places of interest. There could also be electronic advertising in the train carriages as the train approaches those various cities and towns advertising places of interest.

What to ask the client

How would you like to target the audience? Billboards, train station, inside the train, newspaper etc...?
Is there any other competition from other train operators?
Deadline for initial ideas, proofs and/or artwork
Budget

Brief 3

To raise awareness of the risks of underage drinking and contribute towards a cultural change in society’s attitude towards alcohol. The purpose of the Department for Children, OCA Graphic Design35 Schools and Families is to make this the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up... to make children and young people happy and healthy and help them stay on track. With a core proposition of ‘Alcohol leaves you (or your children) vulnerable’, the campaign will urge parents to talk to their children before they consider drinking, to help avoid vulnerable situations. The messages to young people will get them to think about the effects of drinking. Creative ideas should use the campaign identity ‘Why let drink decide?’ to extend the campaign’s reach and specifically target young people aged between 13 and 16. We are open to ideas about the media or format you think is most appropriate to reach the target audience.

Analysis of brief 3

Keywords

Underage drinking, Cultural change, Alcohol, Vulnerable, Effects of drinking

What are you being asked to do?

In this brief I am being asked to raise awareness of under-age drinking and contribute towards a cultural change in societal attitude towards alcohol.

What the client wants the work you are doing to achieve?

To make this place the best place in the world to grow up. Be healthy, happy and stay on track. Urge children to think about the effects of drinking and parents to talk to their children about drinking and alcohol.

Who your target audience is

The target audience is young people aged between 13-16 years old, but on a secondary level, parents.

Where and how it will be reproduced

The format and media is open to the designer to decide what would be the most appropriate for the age group.

What to ask the client

How hard-hitting and graphic can the format be? Do they want a strong, hard-hitting approach or a more gentle approach? The feel and tone of the project.
Have you run a campaign like this before? What was the outcome? Did it involve any famous people or brands to help endorse the campaign?
Do you have a budget for social media, to add videos or motion graphics as young people are on social media and devices every day.
Budget

Having analysed the briefs which one do you think you would most like to tackle? Is it the one with the most restrictions or the one that is most open to interpretation? What do you think your chosen brief would offer you? In what way do you think it would stretch your skills and abilities?

Reflection

In order for a design to be successful, it must start with a brief. (See Fig.1) It should include all the information the designer needs to research and plan for the successful completion of the project.

(Leonard & Ambrose, 2012). While analysing all of the briefs, all of them required me to ask further questions. None of the briefs stated a budget, timeline or offered any branding, photos or media to work with. I think there are very few briefs that in practice will contain all of the required information. There is always opportunity to ask for more information to complete the brief before the process of design starts.

"A graphic design brief and its process must become part of graphic design teaching and informed by research. When this design process is embraced as part of the design process it becomes an integral part of the process and adds knowledge and value to practice" (Meron, 2021)

Understanding what clients expect and what needs to be addressed can be achieved by listening. Sometimes, clients will leave out important details or can be misguided and we have to figure out exactly what they want. Assess their needs and ask them questions about their wants, their stories, their goals, and the message they want to convey. Research can begin once you have that information. The brief must always be kept in mind because it's easy to keep clients in their comfort zones rather than their goals. (Design Guy, 2007)

In the briefs I received, brief one with Quaker Oats was very restrictive and the other two briefs were quite open, especially brief two. The brief is a problem that needs to be solved by design (Ambrose, Harris and Ball, 2019). The design process begins with identifying and overcoming potential creative, practical, or economic obstacles.

Initially if I was asked this question before I really analysed the briefs, I would have preferred the Quaker Oats brief, because it told me what they wanted and was the most prescriptive. It meant that there would be no misunderstandings, they were clear in what they wanted. However, I surprised myself and thought brief two with the rail journey was more exciting. It gave me more freedom to experiment, use imagery and explore and research the brief further. I do think that brief two would take more time because of the amount of research involved. Graphic design research can be used to inform design decisions in various ways (Walker, 2017).

The idea for a project is sparked by one or more keywords; keywords represent the essence of the project and are drawn from the insights and goals in the brief. (Nottingham and Stout, 2019). As I was analysing the keywords for each of the briefs, ideas were already coming to my mind as to how I should approach each brief. I could start to mentally anaylse research needed for the design. This offers me time to research any gaps in my knowledge and this will be an ongoing learning process that would

Fig. 1 Design Process (2018)

continue with every project. It also gives me the chance to gain inspiration from from the past and to draw inspiration from current trends and try to fuse them together to design something new and fresh.

"How will you create interesting designs if you have no interests?" (Downs, 2013)

Skills and abilities will always be stretched as technology is always being improved. One has to keep up with the changes and keep learning, but also have a wide interest in different subjects to give you a different perspective when designing.

To make the design process easier a questionnaire or form could be filled out to gather all the details needed for the brief and research for the design process.

I watched the following series of online videos to further my understanding of briefs: