“What's the Brief?”
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: “What's the brief?” is an everyday question within the graphic design process. Moreover, the concept and importance of a design brief is overtly understood well beyond design practice itself—especially among stakeholders who work with designers and clients who commission design services. Indeed, a design brief is often an assumed and expected physical or metaphoric artefact for guiding the creative process. When a brief is lacking, incomplete or unclear, it can render an already ambiguous graphic design process and discipline even more fraught with misinterpretation. Nevertheless, even in wider design discourse, there appears to be little research on design briefs and the briefing process (Jones and Askland; Paton and Dorst). It seems astonishing that, even in Peter Phillips’s 2014 edition of Creating the Perfect Design Brief, he feels compelled to comment that “there are still no books available about design briefs” and that the topic is only “vaguely” covered within design education (21). While Phillips’s assertion is debatable if one draws purely from online vernacular sources or professional guides, it is supported by the lack of scholarly attention paid to the design brief. Graphic design briefs are often mentioned within design books, journals, and online sources. However, this article argues that the format, function and use of such briefs are largely assumed and rarely identified and studied. Even within the broader field of design research, the tendency appears to be to default to “the design brief” as an assumed shorthand, supporting Phillips’s argument about the nebulous nature of the topic. As this article contextualises, this is further problematised by insufficient attention cast on graphic design itself as a specific discipline. This article emerges from a wider, multi-stage creative practice study into graphic design practice, that used experimental performative design research methods to investigate graphic designers’ professional relationships with stakeholders (Meron, Strangely). The article engages with specific outcomes from that study that relate to the design brief. The article also explores existing literature and research and argues for academics, the design industry, and educationalists, to focus closer attention on the design brief. It concludes by suggesting that experimental and collaborative design methods offers potential for future research into the design brief. Contextualising the Design Brief It is critical to differentiate the graphic design brief from the operational briefs of architectural design (Blyth and Worthington; Khan) or those used in technical practices such as software development or IT systems design, which have extensive industry-formalised briefing practices and models such as the waterfall system (Petersen et al.) or more modern processes such as Agile (Martin). Software development and other technical design briefs are necessarily more formulaically structured than graphic design briefs. Their requirements are generally empirically and mechanistically located, and often mission-critical. In contrast, the conceptual nature of creative briefs in graphic design creates the potential for them to be arbitrarily interpreted. Even in wider design discourse, there appears to be little consistency about the form that a brief takes. Some sources indicate that a brief only requires one page (Elebute; Nov and Jones) or even a single line of text (Jones and Askland). At other times briefs are described as complex, high-level documents embedded within processes which designers respond to with the aim of producing end products to satisfy clients’ requirements (Ambrose; Patterson and Saville). Ashby and Johnson (40) refer to the design brief as a “solution neutral” statement, the aim being to avoid preconceptions or the narrowing of the creative possibilities of a project. Others describe a consultative (Walsh), collaborative and stakeholder-inclusive process (Phillips). The Scholarly Brief Within scholarly design research, briefs inevitably manifest as an assumed artefact or process within each project; but the reason for their use or antecedents for chosen formats are rarely addressed. For example, in “Creativity in the Design Process” (Dorst and Cross) some elements of the design brief are described. The authors also describe at what stage of the investigation the brief is introduced and present a partial example of the brief. However, there is no explanation of the form of the brief or the reasons behind it. They simply describe it as being typical for the design medium, adding that its use was considered a critical part of addressing the design problem. In a separate study within advertising (Johar et al.), researchers even admit that the omission of crucial elements from the brief—normally present in professional practice—had a detrimental effect on their results. Such examples indicate the importance of briefs for the design process, yet further illustrating the omission of direct engagement with the brief within the research design, methodology, and methods. One exception comes from a study amongst business students (Sadowska and Laffy) that used the design brief as a pedagogical tool and indicates that interaction with, and changes to, elements of a design brief impact the overall learning process of participants, with the brief functioning as a trigger for that process. Such acknowledgement of the agency of a design brief affirms its importance for professional designers (Koslow et al.; Phillips). This use of a brief as a research device informed my use of it as a reflective and motivational conduit when studying graphic designers’ perceptions of stakeholders, and this will be discussed shortly. The Professional Brief Professionally, the brief is a key method of communication between designers and stakeholders, serving numerous functions including: outlining creative requirements, audience, and project scope; confirming project requirements; and assigning and documenting roles, procedures, methods, and approval processes. The format of design briefs varies from complex multi-page procedural documents (Patterson and Saville; Ambrose) produced by marketing departments and sent to graphic design agencies, to simple statements (Jones and Askland; Elebute) from small to medium-sized businesses. These can be described as the initial proposition of the design brief, with the following interactions comprising the ongoing briefing process. However, research points to many concerns about the lack of adequate briefing information (Koslow, Sasser and Riordan). It has been noted (Murray) that, despite its centrality to graphic design, the briefing process rarely lives up to designers’ expectations or requirements, with the approach itself often haphazard. This reinforces the necessarily adaptive, flexible, and compromise-requiring nature of professional graphic design practice, referred to by design researchers (Cross; Paton and Dorst). However, rather than lauding these adaptive and flexible designer abilities as design attributes, such traits are often perceived by professional practitioners as unequal (Benson and Dresdow), having evolved by the imposition by stakeholders, rather than being embraced by graphic designers as positive designer skill-sets. The Indeterminate Brief With insufficient attention cast on graphic design as a specific scholarly discipline (Walker; Jacobs; Heller, Education), there is even less research on the briefing process within graphic design practice (Cumming). Literature from professional practice on the creation and function of graphic design briefs is often formulaic (Phillips) and fractured. It spans professional design bodies, to templates from mass-market printers (Kwik Kopy), to marketing-driven and brand-development approaches, in-house style guides, and instructional YouTube videos (David). A particularly clear summary comes from Britain’s Design Council. This example describes the importance of a good design brief, its requirements, and carries a broad checklist that includes the company background, project aims, and target audience. It even includes stylistic tips such as “don’t be afraid to use emotive language in a brief if you think it will generate a shared passion about the project” (Design Council). From a subjective perspective, these sources appear to contain sensible professional advice. However, with little scholarly research on the topic, how can we know that, for example, using emotive language best informs the design process? Why might this be helpful and desirable (or otherwise) for designers? These varied approaches highlight the indeterminate treatment of the design brief. Nevertheless, the very existence of such diverse methods communicates a pattern of acknowledgement of the criticality of the brief, as well as the desire, by professional bodies, commentators, and suppliers, to ensure that both designers and stakeholders engage effectively with the briefing process. Thus, with such a pedagogic gap in graphic design discourse, scholarly research into the design brief has the potential to inform vernacular and formal educational resources. Researching the Design Brief The research study from which this article emerges (Meron, Strangely) yielded outcomes from face-to-face interviews with eleven (deidentified) graphic designers about their perceptions of design practice, with particular regard to their professional relationships with other creative stakeholders. The study also surveyed online discussions from graphic design forums and blog posts. This first stage of research uncovered feelings of lacking organisational gravitas, creative ownership, professional confidence, and design legitimacy among the designers in relation to stakeholders. A significant causal factor pointed to practitioners’ perceptions of lacking direct access to and involvement with key sources of creative inspiration and information; one
Source: M/C Journal
DOI: 10.5204/mcj.2797
Author: Yaron Meron
Institution: Monash University
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3192895133