What is a Design Brief?
Design Briefs are used at the beginning of a project to outline what a brand wants a designer to accomplish for the project. The design brief is a very important tool for every company. The design brief is a document that is developed by a person or team from the brand that outlines their brand. The section that is in a design brief is define, audience, goals, and project attributes. These are the fundamentals of a design brief, there may be more on a brief depending on the size of the project and the pieces needed to complete the project.
Define
The first section of the design brief is to give information about the brand itself such as the mission, values and personality attributes of the company. This is what the company stands for and how they want to be perceived by there customers. This is very important to the process because this is the brand the designer is representing and all the decisions should be catered to what the brand missions, values, and attributes. Here is an example of what that looks like. This is a hypothetical brand:
Audience
The next part of the design brief is the goals the project is trying to accomplish. This section includes the audience, objective, and project attributes. These are the fundamentals of the project, this is what your goals are when you are done with the project. The first part of this is the audience and this is the people that are buying or experiencing the product. For this section, you want to set up a demographic that you want to cater to and what their needs are. For example, one could be families and how you want to have a kid menu at the restaurant. They are one of the most important parts of this because that is who you are designing for. This caters to the audience so they will hopefully buy the product. This is again the hypothetical example from before:
Goals
Another important factor in the design brief is the goals section. With this section, you want to layout your objectives of the entire project or the end goal snd how they are going to be accomplished. This could be a number of things depending on the project. For a new hypothetical business like the example below the goals are big and demanding cause they are starting from the ground up. Others might be small it just depends on what the project is. The next is how that goal will be accomplished. That could be with a making a new website or restarting from the ground up. Below is an example of this in use, again this is hypothetical:
Project Attributes
Lastly, there is the project attributes part of the design brief. This section is used to show how long the designers have on the project and the budget that has to complete project. This is important for the designer to know what they have to work with. Projects that have a budget of a million dollars with let’s say two years look very different than projects that are one hundred thousand dollars for three months. The work put forward is completely different, also more is expected from a longer project.
Not all design brief looks the same, some have no information it just has a goal. This is seen with smaller brands that do not understand how these things work. This means that the designer to ask questions and research more on there own.
Design briefs are a very important part of the design process. Without it, the designer will not understand what the brands’ vision is and the audience they are going for. Without this step, even more, work is required for the designer to research before they even start the project. The project runs smoother when a well-informed design brief is provided by the brand.
