Return Brief Example

Client Brief:

Our café is a family-owned business that serves breakfast, lunch, and coffee. We have a loyal customer base of local families, but we would like to increase the number of people visiting our venue by catering to youth and young adults. We will be doing this by introducing an after school special to our menu and creating new posters to advertise this. We would also like to increase our visibility on social media. The posters and social media posts should both draw attention to our new after school specials as well as highlighting existing menu items, such as breakfasts and coffee.

Return Brief:

Thank you for considering me for your design needs. Based on your brief, I have identified the following objectives for the posters and social media posts:

1. Increase brand awareness: I aim to create a cohesive visual identity for your café that can be easily recognizable and stands out on social media. For this reason, I will create posters and social media posts that use the same colour palette and typography while using different principles of design that suit the mode of the design.

2. Improve connection to young people: I want to showcase the elements of your cafe that will draw in youth and young adults. This will include drawing attention to your new menu items and your prices. I intend on targeting this audience through the use of humour and engaging and playful visuals. This will include emphasising emoji style images and using bright, contrasting colours. 

3. Promote offerings: I will include your breakfast and coffee offerings as well as the new after school specials in the designs to help promote your menu.These functional elements (information) will be balanced against aesthetic choices. As aesthetic and humour are important to young people, I will encourage the use of a minimal amount of text so that the designs remain engaging to the intended audience.

Design Approach:

To achieve these objectives, I plan to create posters and social media tiles that use emoji style imagery, bright complementary colours, negative space and simple, legible typography. The intention of this campaign will be to draw a young audience's attention through humour and largely visual communication. Each design will emphasise an individual emoji image to capture viewer attention and then direct them towards the various menu offerings while also highlighting prices. Each design will include a humorous subheading that links the emoji to the menu item being offered. The principles and elements that will be used are explained below:

Hierarchy - Hierarchy is a principle that emphasises particular elements of the design and guides viewers through in a specific order. This can be done through size, contrast, colour, alignment and repetition (Coreldraw, 2023). In my designs, I will use size to guide viewers, first drawing their attention to the emoji images that will take up most of the design and be placed in the centre, then using a subheading to link that image to your menu items and finally placing your logo below this so it is the last thing viewers will see and will therefore remember your branding.

Colour - I will use complementary (contrasting) colours and these have been linked to attracting younger audiences (Formation Media, 2015). There will be various colours used (like the colours of the rainbow) as different emoji images will be used for each design. Complementary colours also add drama to a design and so will be eye catching when viewed on social media (GCF Global, 2023).

Negative space - I will deliberately create designs that utilise negative space as this will look clean, minimalistic and suit the online space which is an area you would like to expand into (GCF Global, 2023).

Overall, the designs will be playful, engaging, humorous and contemporary while aligning with your brand identity.

I have evaluated the opportunities and constraints of this project. One opportunity is to leverage social media to reach a wider and yonder audience. This is why humour and emoji style images will be used to gain interest in this audience. A constraint will be potentially detracting your current audience with these ads. To address this, they will be shared on social media that attracts young people (such as Instagram and Snapchat). Another social media opportunity is sharing content regularly to increase engagement (Oberlo, 2018). However, a constraint is that I have 6 weeks to work on this project. To solve this, I will design a layout that can be repurposed for future posts by adjusting the image used. I will design three examples to show you what this can look like so that you can continue posting yourself.

Finally, I have  critically evaluated the ethical and sustainable application of my design approach. To minimise environmental impact, the campaign will exist mostly online. This will also help target younger audiences. A hashtag will be used to encourage audience engagement while still projecting to a wide audience. Physical posters will be produced using a more limited number of colours (approximately four) as this will reduce the amount of printer ink required. Posters will be printed in limited editions and then cycled through as this will maintain audience interest while reducing the number of overall posters created. Online posts will include a description of visual images to promote accessibility. I will also ensure that images developed for this campaign are designed by me and therefore will not infringe on intellectual property.

I have a few questions to help us better understand your vision:

1. Is there a specific version of your logo that you would like me to incorporate into the posters and social media posts? Does the colour need to remain the same or can I change it to suit the post?

2. Do you have any specific printing requirements or preferences for the posters? Did you have a specific size for the poster print in mind?

3. What is your timeline for completion, and do you have any specific events or promotions that we should keep in mind?

I look forward to working with you to create designs that reflect your cafe's unique personality while appealing to your target audience.

Regards,

Cooldesignerdude
Cooldesignerdude@gmail.com 

Example Mood Board

Bibliography

CorelDraw (2023), “Hierarchy in Graphic Design: Understanding What it Means and How to Use It,” accessed 20/03/23, https://www.coreldraw.com/en/tips/graphic-design-principles/hierarchy/#:~:text=What%20is%20Hierarchy%20in%20Graphic,the%20design%20as%20a%20whole.

Dansky (2018) Create a Vector Emoji in Illustrator Tutorial, accessed 20/03/23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17JanKO48w8

Formation Media (2015) “Colour psychology – using colour to appeal to your target market” accessed 20/03/23, https://formationmedia.co.uk/blog/colour-psychology-using-colour-to-appeal-to-your-target-market/

GCF Global (2023) “Beginning Graphic Design - Colour” accessed 20/03/23, https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/beginning-graphic-design/color/1/

Oberlo (2018) “15 Ways to increase social media engagement quickly” accessed 20/03/23, https://au.oberlo.com/blog/social-media-engagement#:~:text=9.-,Post%20Multiple%20Times%20Daily,you%20build%20an%20engaged%20audience.

Twinkl (2023) Cafe Display Poster, accessed 20/03/23, https://www.twinkl.com.au/resource/t-t-1192-cafe-display-posters 

Colour Schemes