Starting a creative brief

Here are ways to think about creating the creative brief. 

Objectives


This is a great looking site from Fist of Fury

Here is another list from Terry Lee Stone 

What’s a creative brief?
In the best cases, a creative brief is a document created through initial meetings, interviews, readings and discussions between a client and designer before any work begins. Throughout the project, the creative brief continues to inform and guide the work. A good creative brief will answer these questions:
• What is this project?
• Who is it for?
• Why are we doing it?
• What needs to be done? By whom? By when?
• Where and how will it be used?

The 10 most important things to include in a creative brief
1. Background Summary: Who is the client? What is the product or service? What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (or SWOTs) involved with this product or service? Are there existing research, reports and other documents that help you understand the situation?

2. Overview: What is the project? What are we designing and why? Why do we need this project? What’s the opportunity?

3. Drivers: What is our goal for this project? What are we trying to achieve? What is the purpose of our work? What are our top three objectives?

4. Audience: Who are we talking to? What do they think of us? Why should they care?

5. Competitors: Who is the competition? What are they telling the audience that we should be telling them? SWOT analysis on them? What differentiates us from them?

6. Tone: How should we be communicating? What adjectives describe the feeling or approach?

7. Message: What are we saying with this piece exactly? Are the words already developed or do we need to develop them? What do we want audiences to take away?

8. Visuals: Are we developing new images or picking up existing ones? If we are creating them, who/what/where are we photographing or illustrating? And why?

9. Details: Any mandatory information that must be included? List of deliverables? Preconceived ideas? Format parameters? Limitations and restrictions? Timeline, schedule, budget?

10. People: Who are we reporting to? Who exactly is approving this work? Who needs to be informed of our progress? By what means?

From http://www.scribblelive.com/

What to include in your creative brief: A checklist

• A paragraph or two about your project’s objectives
• Your core message and 3-5 features/benefits to your audience
• Notes on themes or ideas, you want the creative to embrace. Make sure to be clear about how closely (or loosely) you want them followed.
• Your audience: Describe them briefly, give key demographic information and provide any insights you have about what they’re trying to achieve (and how you’ll help them achieve it).
• The primary call-to-action or takeaway message.
• Some examples of what success would look like (website traffic, sales, etc.)
• Examples of projects you like (or that have been successful) in a similar format (videos, infographics, etc.)
• Brand and copy style guidelines: the fonts, tone, colors, logos, and other elements that will keep this content consistent with your brand. This doesn’t need to be in your creative brief necessarily, but you should at least explain how external teams can access your style guides.
• The specifications for the final product: file types, sizes, formats, etc.
• The full list of assets you need. Will you need a banner ad, too? A blog post? Copy for social media promotions? Scope creep is an easy way to get your project derailed and behind schedule.
• Clear information about both launch dates and due dates for drafts. (If you have flexibility, make sure to let your team know. Your team may have ideas they won’t share if they think there’s no time.)

Got all that? While you want to communicate all this information, you should also be able to distill it to a page or two (excluding style rules). If your creative brief comes off looking like a Tolstoy novel, chances are it’s not going to get read – or at the very least that some important details will be missed.

The Assignment 

Your group will develop a creative brief for the product below:

The winning submission to this year’s Buckminster Fuller Challenge, a $100K prize doled out to the most socially responsible design, was Ecovative’s mycological biomaterial. College buddies Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre came up with the idea to use fungi as a binding agent while studying engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York back in 2007. Their eco-friendly material could replace existing plastic foams — which are both non-recyclable and petroleum-based — with a substitute derived from fungi for applications in furniture, building insulation, and even footwear or surfboards.