My take on Creative Brief

Ask someone to sign a contract, and they will usually have a reason as to why they don’t want to sign. A contract contains hard, and fast rules of the business end of a project. The length of execution, change fees, payments and rights of use are some of the elements spelled out in a contract. With careful wording, a creative brief can hold all of that information, too!

When first sitting down in the office, or conference room of a client, or meeting of the different players in your company, it’s time to start taking notes on what is said, asking certain questions, and… setting requirements, and boundaries.

At one firm, which was a very large corporation, we would all sit down in the conference room for a project meeting. Each department head would listen to the project scope, and desired results. Like a puzzle, each step depended on every department meeting the milestones set so the next department could pick up there, and supply the needed elements only they could provide, and so on around the company until it fell upon the art department.

If one department took too long with their part, like a tower with a missing part in the middle, the project would start to tumble down. Unfortunately, it would always be the art department that would be crushed under the weight of the steel beams of incompetence, supplied by other departments.