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The design brief is the final part of the Research and Analysis phase of the design cycle. It's purpose is to summarize your most important findings from your research and analysis. The word 'brief' means 'short, not long'. So your design brief should be short! Less than one page long.
Professional designers use design briefs when they do design projects. An architect who is designing a new school building might spend weeks or months researching and analyzing other school buildings. They might collect all of their research notes and pictures which could be 50 pages or more! But then they will write a design brief that is only 1 or 2 pages long that summarizes the most important findings. This way, other people can read the design brief and understand the research the architect has done, without needing to read all 50 pages.
Student Example
This student was working on a project to create a poster about climate change. Notice how they summarize important things they learned about color, font and poster design. Also notice that they cite their sources by referencing the Appendix.
Design Brief: I intend to design and create a poster or infographic on one specific mitigation technique for climate change. The audience will be fellow high school students and the poster will be displayed around the school. It's important that students are well-informed about climate changes, as this is one of the biggest world problems we are all facing today. (Appendix 4)
To design and create a good poster I must use the research I gathered. First of all, it should have a good color scheme. There are many different color schemes to choose from, but I think for this project using earthy tones and soft colors would be good. Then black for the main text. I did research on different color combinations already but triads and split complementary colors would be best for this project. Earthy colors and soft colors give off a sense of cleanliness and represent the earth which is the main topic for my poster. I should use 1 contrasting color which will probably be pink as red is too strong. (Appendix 1)
The poster size should be the size of a sheet of A2. I do not have any specifics for if it’s landscape or portrait because both would look good. The poster will need to be made online. From venngage, infogr.am, piktochart, canva and visme I think I will use Canva or piktochart because I have experience using both of them. All the other softwares are good and function similarly.
For the text I want to use helvetica and garamond. The letters in helvetica are close together and it is a simple font that can match any message. Garamond can come in many variations. It was created in 1989. It is a great font for magazines, textbooks and long bodies of text. To prove that it is a great font, it has been named the second best font after helvetica by a German publication. Other fonts I considered were tragan, futura, bodoni, bickham and frutiger. (Appendix 2)
The key to achieving an elegant, simple and attractive infographic is to use your “whitespace” and layout effectively. Whitespace is an unmarked piece of an infographic. It means margins, space between columns, text, etc. Whitespace is very important in visual engagement because cramped information and pictures plus small text is very hard to look at. On the other hand, if there is too much whitespace the page will look empty. An infographic layout refers to the movements and arrangement of visual elements in your product/content. You should have a story to tell when making an infographic. Then we could use a layout to best suit that story. (Appendix 3)
What do you need to do for this part of the Design Cycle?
In 1 or 2 sentences, state the problem you are trying to solve, why it is important and who the client/audience is. This is a summary from the first part of your Criterion A.
Explain the most important findings from your analysis of existing products
Explain the most important findings from your other research
Reference your Appendix any time you specifically mention research that you collected there
Remember to write in your own words, and use quotes if you want to share someone else's words.
Hints and Tips for Writing the Design Brief:
I like to say the design brief is for lazy people! What I mean is: if someone doesn't have time to read all your research (or they are too lazy), they should be able to read only the design brief, and still get a good understanding. That's why we also include a short sentence or two at the beginning explaining the design problem.
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