Beauty and the Creative Brief

As anyone who spends their days in indentured creativity can tell you, being creative day in and day out, on demand, under deadline, is a very hard thing to maintain. One of the things that we as creatives rely upon is a well written creative brief. A well crafted on can indeed make our work "beautiful".

Recently, I have set about reworking our Creative Brief template here at Optiem. As times change and we adapt new ways of doing things, these documents need maintenance in order to stay up to date with what we do. From specific questions about content management systems to how optimized for search a design should be, there are questions that as designers we need to know in order to produce a quality product for our clients.

Our creative brief document has indeed grown over the years. However we have tried to keep it simple and matter of fact. We rely on the Account Executives or the Project Managers here to complete these documents. And in fact, most of the questions on it are just that.. facts. We have purposely written the document to take out as much of the subjectivity of the person completing it as we can. This is important because unless the client themselves are filling out the document, we can't be sure that we are meeting all of their needs. So the actual questions don't leave much to guess.

Creative briefs are nothing new to the advertising industry. But in my experience, I haven't seen them applied often to the Internet. Be it a web site, email or otherwise. I think that is because most of the web companies are spawned by technology, not by creative. That is alright, but not really an excuse. If you are responsible for taking a client's vague vision of where they want to be positioned visually and with messaging and branding, you need a creative brief if you are going to touch them creatively.

Staying on message, staying on target (audience), and staying in budget are all things that are crucial to the process. Without a document to guide you through these obstacles, you are simply guessing at creative direction.

As a creative director for several years now, I have become pretty good at the guessing process. And often, frankly, the client really doesn't have a firm grasp on what they ultimately want anyway. We are in the somewhat luxurious position of helping them to find that. Branding, messaging, positioning, and creating exciting creative. But doing that in the vacuum without a creative brief document is like driving without a license. Eventually it is going to cost you.

If you aren't using a creative brief document to build your Internet products, I suggest you look into it. At the very least it will help you focus your creative vision. And that will always increase your chances at beautiful design. Write me and I will send you a copy of our document. It could serve as a good place to start for your very own process.

Whats Next? I will talk a little about wireframes (and why I hate them) and why designers should NEVER see them let alone create them. Also, at Optiem we use something called a PDD. Find out what THAT is and how it helps us keep our design work on target.

XHTML Services and the Future

At Optiem, we are always keeping our eyes out for talent. As the Creative Director I am charged with keeping our work visually appealing, on message, within brand and under budget. We also must be creating pages that are high-quality, cross-browser compatible W3C Valid XHTML with fully realized CSS markup. A tall order for a designer.

We have a great staff here at Optiem, but finding this kind of talent in Cleveland, Ohio has been no easy task. And as I talk to my local counterparts I find that they have similar issues as well. We see great designers, but they have no experience (and in some cases no desire) in coding. And although we are indeed a specialized area of design, there is a constant need for this type of cross developmental thinking. We also see a fair share of developers who would be designers... if only for this little thing called "talent". Not something you can pick up in a Web Design for Dummys book at Borders.

Recently I have seen a lot of these ads for Design to HTML services. One of them that I visited recently (http://www.psd2html.com) offers a complete, validated and fully compatible coding service for as low as $153. That is hard to ignore. Especially, when factoring our relative workloads here, the desire to stay on message and create COMPELLING design, that development of these more mundane parts of a web project can be costly... not only monetarily but also creatively.

This smells a lot to me like the off-shoring did a few years ago. On some levels, it is repulsive and takes away jobs from people right here in Cleveland. Or at least some would argue that. But on other levels, I can see the reason why people would want to buy cheap, clean OVERNIGHT code for their web sites.

In the case of PSD2HTML they deliver the coded page in EIGHT hours. Now frankly, and our clients know this, we have to schedule in time to work on the variety of projects that we work on. So coding up a proof of concept for a client could cost us eight hours of OUR time. I won't get into what that costs our clients, but it is considerably more than $153.

This all leads to the value question. We provide a service to our clients that is customized. And although design to code shops spend specific time on individual projects, they don't know the end client or their specific businesses. I don't know how important that is one the message and design parts are established. But I do know what we do is of value to our customers.

Would we go to a design to code provider for work? I wouldn't rule it out in a pinch... of course that can be said about most things. But I think in general, we like the control we have to make our client sites perform the way we feel they should. And our clients deserve that.

No disrespect to the code for hire guys at all. But you will always be able to find someone to do almost anything cheaper and faster than the next guy... the question is, when does the quality suffer?