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    Creating the Perfect Design Brief: How to Manage Design for Strategic Advantage
    Creating the Perfect Design Brief: How to Manage Design for Strategic Advantage
    Creating the Perfect Design Brief: How to Manage Design for Strategic Advantage
    Ebook335 pages3 hours

    Creating the Perfect Design Brief: How to Manage Design for Strategic Advantage

    By Peter L. Phillips

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    About this ebook

    In the only book of its kind, now revised and updated with the latest research on the topic, veteran design consultant Peter L. Phillips offers the tools for success gained from nearly thirty years of developing corporate and brand identity programs. Readers will discover the most effective formats for design briefs, how to structure the best possible team, what distinguishes a great design brief from an adequate one, how to use the brief in project tracking, as a measuring tool, as a means of getting approval for a design solution, and much, much more. By covering all of the essential elements of an effective design brief, this unique and empowering guide will help you to ensure that the goals of your corporate design strategy are met.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAllworth
    Release dateJul 1, 2012
    ISBN9781621532279
    Creating the Perfect Design Brief: How to Manage Design for Strategic Advantage

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      Book preview

      Creating the Perfect Design Brief - Peter L. Phillips

      Introduction

      When I went to college to study design in the Sixties, the subject of design briefs was never mentioned. Fortunately, today the topic is finding its way into design curriculums, albeit slowly.

      In college, our instructors gave us specific assignments every week. These were well-crafted design problems to solve; I suppose one could argue these were a form of design brief. However, these assignments were never called design briefs per se.

      When I entered the corporate world a few years later as manager of a small design group, I learned very quickly that marketing people indeed prepared design briefs and handed them to the design group. We were expected to follow their briefs without much question or discussion. More often than not, these briefs frustrated me and my group of designers. These briefs rarely contained the type of information we really needed in order to create an effective design solution. Furthermore, the deadlines we were given were always impossibly short. To make matters worse, we rarely had the opportunity to have any kind of meaningful dialogue with the individual who had written the brief in the first place. Instead, a direct report of that individual, often called a project manager, was assigned to monitor our progress. These project managers rarely were able to supply the information we so desperately wanted and needed.

      I looked for some written body of knowledge on the subject and came up more or less empty. There were some articles in various design magazines that touched on design briefs, or creative briefs, but I could not find any definitive books on the subject. Today, some forty years later, to the best of my knowledge, there are still no books available about design briefs, except for this one, and the subject is only vaguely covered in many notable professional design curriculums.

      However, the practice of using some kind of brief in the design process prevails in the corporate world, forcing many of us in the design profession to try to figure out how to deal with these things in some kind of meaningful way.

      Several years ago, the Design Management Institute (DMI) developed the Professional Development Program to offer design professionals an opportunity to enhance their managerial skills in a variety of areas. A survey was conducted asking DMI members what topics they would most like to see included in this new program. The design brief was in the top ten. I was asked to create a professional development seminar on the topic. Since the publication of the first edition of this book, I have also done a great many workshops for in-house groups independently, and lectured on the topic for a number of design associations worldwide.

      Utilizing my own experience with design briefs and the design brief process, as well as the collective experience of a number of other professional design managers, I created a seminar that has now been attended by designers and design managers from around the globe. The response has been extremely positive to this particular seminar. As a result of this success and the additional insights I have gathered from all the seminar participants about design briefs commonly in use today, I was asked to write this book.

      No Magic Formulas

      It is important to understand there is no magic formula here. If there were just one correct format to use in creating the perfect design brief, all of our lives would be far less complicated! So please don’t look for a single one-size-fits-all perfect design brief format here. It doesn’t exist. Rather, this book covers the key ingredients that any good design brief should contain, and the critical processes (including changing the way designers think about design briefs) involved in creating a design brief that is truly useful to all individuals involved with a design project. The best design brief process is a business-oriented, strategic process; therefore this book also describes the various ways the design profession must rethink management of design as a strategic process.

      It is also important to remember that there are a variety of design disciplines, and each discipline requires slightly different information in a truly useful design brief. A brief for a print project such as a brochure or catalog would probably not require any engineering elements. However, an industrial design brief for the design of a new product or tool would most likely contain information related to engineering and manufacture. A design brief for a packaging project would likewise need to contain information specifically related to package design, as well as package engineering.

      During the past few years, I have also come to grips with the fact that the concept of the term design has changed dramatically. I have a designer friend who has a hobby of photographing signage using the term design during his travels worldwide. He has shown me his slide show with businesses that state they are: Pizza Designers, Dog Designers, Fingernail Designers, Insurance Coverage Designers, and Employee Health Benefit Package Designers. The term seems to be used by everybody and anybody.

      Please understand this book is intended primarily for people involved with graphic design, packaging design, and industrial design projects. It won’t be of much help if you design pizzas.

      Readers must understand that the process is complicated by these differences, as well as by the differences in the way various enterprises structure their design resources. Therefore, it is necessary for each design organization to create its own specific set of standards, processes, and guidelines for its design briefs. This book is intended to help design professionals create those processes and formats effectively and efficiently.

      During the course of teaching my seminar, Creating the Perfect Design Brief, I have learned that people use a variety of terms for what I am calling a design brief. Many people refer to them as a creative brief. Others are accustomed to other terms such as marketing brief, project brief, job ticket, or innovation brief. Whatever the term used, we are talking about a written description of a project that requires some form of visual design.

      My least favorite term is job ticket. This is usually no more than a one-page summary of the title of the project, the due date, the budget, the name of the requesting person or group, and other mostly tactical data such as quantities, shipping instructions, and so on. In my opinion, most of these job tickets are more or less useless for the actual process of developing a design solution.

      I am, on the other hand, quite taken with innovation brief, a term commonly used in Europe. I like what that implies. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t regard design as an innovative, or even a strategic business process. Rather, they think of it as a decorative service.

      The Format of a Design Brief

      Actually, there is no single correct or preferred format for a design brief. I have seen really good design briefs that are totally narrative, written in paragraph form, and others that employ the bulleted list format. Increasingly, I am seeing design briefs that have been developed with a computer program format wherein requestors for design work simply fill in the blanks after a list of key questions. I have also seen some excellent briefs formatted as PowerPoint presentations.

      The format you will eventually adopt will depend largely on the specific type of design work you are involved with (industrial, graphic, packaging, etc.), and the most useful style for your company. The format is, of course, critical in that it should be easy to read and track through. Other than that, what is most important is that the brief contains all of the information and data necessary for every stakeholder in the process. It must also be available in hard copy, as well as online.

      The computer-generated type of format seems to offer the biggest challenges to designers I have talked with over the years. It is ironic that for the most part, designers have developed these computer-generated formats! It’s not so much that the formats are poorly designed, but rather that the design brief format is not used properly. The most common complaint is that many fields are left blank by the requestor(s), or if they are filled in, the information is incomplete. A typical example is a field that would be headlined, Audience. A typical answer in this field is, Customers. For me, that’s not a suitable entry!

      Finding the best format for your organization should not be overlooked. It will take some time, and experimentation, to develop a format that will meet the real-world needs of everyone in your company. I will admit, I have always found that the narrative format has worked best for me. My second choice would be the bulleted list approach.

      How Long Should a Design Brief Be?

      The quick answer to How long should a design brief be? is, As long as necessary. A great many participants in my design brief seminar tell me they have been asked repeatedly to make design briefs as short as possible. That should not be the goal. The real goal is to make design briefs as complete and useful as possible. The final length will ultimately be determined by the requirements of the specific project and its complexity.

      Stir-Frying a Creative Concept

      Kim Zarney, president and creative director of Zarney Creative, a package design firm, wrote an article for DMI’s Design Management Journal¹ entitled, The Core Creative Concept in Branding: A Streamlined Approach. I particularly appreciated Kim’s analogy comparing design briefs to stir-fry cooking. In fact, I have used this article as a jumping-off point for discussion in many of my design brief seminars. I also appreciate the fact that Mr. Zarney advocates a comprehensive design brief as the starting point for discovering core creative concepts. I have received permission to include a portion of his article in this book. There are two reasons I wanted to include his article: 1) It’s a powerful testimonial from one design practitioner on the benefits of developing a comprehensive design brief prior to beginning the process of developing creative concepts, and 2) the article makes it very clear that spending the time to develop a design brief is critical.

      Excerpt from Design Management Journal, by Kim Zarney

      Kim Zarney concludes his article with an actual case study from his firm illustrating the points he has made. I am not including his case study in this book,

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