Who doesn’t want the fastest way to do something?

When we end up with ho-hum visuals that don’t reflect how we see our brand, despite spending hours tweaking and changing and making decisions, we don’t like it.

And it feels horribly unproductive.

We all want our marketing materials to look good without spending countless hours on them.

The key to having a smooth and efficient way of presenting your brand is to have a good brand design framework – which works hard for you across all your customer touchpoints. This is an investment of not just money but also time, in order to get it right. Once your branding is established, it takes a lot of the daily design decision-making out of the process – instead you have a set of tools at your disposal that all join up seamlessly together. The end result is a polished, consistent and professional look for you that is almost effortless to create. This in turn builds familiarity and trust with your audience, and therefore more sales at higher profits. 

A good design brief at the very start is crucial to the success of your design project. It will save you loads of time in the future because it means you have a much clearer picture of what you need and who you are as a brand.

So what is a design brief? It is basically a set of answers to a set of questions, questions that are intended to show where you are in your business and where you want to go. Not only does a clear design brief help with the design process for the visual aspects of branding, it also helps greatly with your brand strategy.

Now, I know it can seem like even more work heaped up on top of your already-busy days.

So, here’s a list of simple questions which will speed up the process greatly.

Q1. What is your product?

Q2. Who is your target audience?

Q3. What’s the primary message you want to communicate?

Q4. What are your brand attributes: promises, features, benefits?

Q5. What is your brand personality?

Q6. Who are your competitors?

Once you get started on this, it helps you become much clearer on your own understanding of your brand personality (or brand story) and it is invaluable for your designer, who otherwise does not have access to all of this information. By writing the answers to these questions, you are forming a solid design brief which can be used by your designer as a guide to getting you the best possible results from your branding project.