3 Tips for Handling Your Next Web Design Brief

It can be extremely difficult sometimes in order to fully understand what the client wants when it comes to design briefs. The point of design briefs is supposed to be to make it clear to you as the art designer about exactly what the client wants. The problem is that this is rarely what design briefs actually have in them. Many times the briefs have a lot of other things in them that are also not important or useful. Here are a few tips for getting design briefs right.

Boil Down to Basics

One important thing to do is to summarize what the client is saying. It may be useful to write everything over again into language that you actually understand more personally. If you do this, you have a much better chance of being able to actually get started on the article in a way that you can accomplish instead of feeling really overwhelmed by the whole thing.

You can open up the brief in a word document sand then write notes about each aspect of the brief in your own words. This could be a great way to interpret all of it and pare down what is extra. For example, if there's a part of the design brief that is going on and on about the history of the company or something you don't need to know you can just highlight the entire section and write something like "history, unimportant" in your notes.

Obviously it's important that you keep all of this to yourself and don't bother the client with it but it really can help to do it this way.

Clarify the Demographic

Another important thing to do when reading a design brief and getting ready to accomplish it is to figure out what the target demographic is of the project. You can do this by asking yourself who will be reading the project.

Who does the client want to read the work, and what sorts of things do these people care about? This information should be included somewhere in the brief in varying degrees of specificity. Information could include stuff about how old the people are, where they live, what their interests are, what sorts of sensibilities they have, what they like to do, what they think in terms of politics and religion and so on.

You need to read this information carefully especially. It might help to bold it or highlight in some ay in your personal copy of the brief, or even rewrite it in your own words. You may also need to do some research in order to make sure you understand who you're designing for because this is going to make a big difference as to how you design everything.

Younger people in the 18-30 demographic just care about different things than those who are much older, for example. Young people are focused on their beginning careers, schooling, having fun and so on. Designing something that is focused on late-life family building just won't appeal to them as much. That's the reason why this is important.

Get a Sense for What the Client Likes

Clients are going to be really different in terms of what stylistic choices they prefer. This includes colors, fonts, formatting, and so on. There should be some sense of this in the briefing, but it's usually not a problem to ask just a few questions if you need to know more about this subject. Clients would usually much rather you ask them questions about what they want to see rather than having to tell you they don't like what you've given them over and over after you've already done everything when the deadline has long passed.

After all, they likely need the design work when they need it so all work including anything you don't understand should be done first.

Overall, it's important to really nail down what your client is looking for in the brief before you get started or else you risk getting lost.