Firstly, why write a design brief at all:

a) It helps you clarify on your objectives. For example do you just want to improve a tired corporate identity, generate sales, encourage enquiries, break into new market areas, launch a new product, or obtain information from your audience?

b) It helps the designer to stay focused on the end result and acts as a point of reference during the design process.

Corporate Profile
Define your corporate profile. Say what you do.

Current situation
Where are you now with regards to sales and marketing. Where do you want to be. A realistic overview of where you are compared to competitors is very useful.

Your target audience
Detail your primary, secondary and tertiary audiences. Explain if you are trying to consolidate these market areas or break into new ones.

Demographics
Detail any demographic information you have about your audience(s) such as:
Age
Sex
Income
Occupation
Location

Communication task
What is the message. If possible show elements to be included in the designed items (logos, taglines, imagery, headlines and text.)

Corporate identity
If you have an established corporate identity, show this to the designer.

Design examples
Providing examples of what you like (and don’t like) can be very helpful for internal discussions and in explaining the direction you want the design to go.
These could include colour, imagery, typography and the look and feel of items you like.

Budget and Time Scale
Even a ball park figure will give the designer an idea of the scope of the project and your expectations. This will facilitate more accurate suggestions about design and production ideas.
Hope this helps

We are really happy to announce that our latest project has gone live. The PPA Architecture website. Take a look at www.ppa-architecture.co.uk/

Web banners are a great way to advertise. We can design these for you to send simple, clear messages to prospective clients which link directly to your website.

Contact us to find out more.

If you can’t be bothered to tweet, but just want to blog occasionally, you can feed Twitter from your blog.

Just go to: http://twitterfeed.com and sign up. You will need you RSS feed URL. This is normally one of the following formats:

• http://example.com/?feed=rss
• http://example.com/?feed=rss2
• http://example.com/?feed=rdf
• http://example.com/?feed=atom

If you get stuck, go to http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds

You can link to facebook as well, so your blog will feed your other social media sites.

Why we use WordPress to build websites?

• Full control off the website content
• Add Images, Documents (PDF, Word Excel etc) and Videos with ease
• Easy to create image galleries
• Create and edit contact forms
• Fully manageable menus
• Blog and latest news features with RSS feeds
• Automatic pagination and archiving for latest news by category, date and author
• Great SEO capabilities
• Automatically created XML sitemaps
• Easy to create password protected pages and posts
• Pings Google, Bing etc every time you update or add content

Social Media and WordPress

WordPress can automatically pull and/or publish content from most social media sites and applications, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google and LinkedIn.

Have a look at one of our recent projects…

www.sophiainvestments.com

QR codes (Quick Response) codes are a specific matrix bar code which contain encoded text, an email address, a web address or other data.

These can be read by camera phones and so act as a shortcut to your web, email or address to clients with a smartphone equipped with a QR reader app.

See http://www.qrstuff.com/ for more information and for generating codes, or, if you have a smartphone take a picture of the QR below and see where it takes you…

If you like our website, you might want to talk to us about updating/redesigning you own. We are fans of WordPress websites because of the huge functionality that is built in to the back end and the easy to use content management system, giving you beautiful, functional websites that are easy for you to update. Call us on 01865 792092 to discuss or contact us via the contact form.

Everything is changing so fast at the moment, and keeping up with Social Media is no exception.

Linking your website to other network media is important. We can help you do it whether it’s a personal Linkedin account…

or a Facebook page for your company….

The Big Picture

Every project has the elements of quality, time and cost within it. These three fight each other as the project progresses and the project manager needs to keep each in control.

If the project culminates in a fixed event deadline, time can not be compromised,  but if deadlines are missed, quality can be compromised as the team rushes to complete the project. Mistakes and inconsistencies are more likely to get through if the job is behind schedule. Costs can escalate too, a simple example of this is that courier costs to an event in Europe can double if you only have two days to deliver instead of four or five.

These tensions are inevitable but it may be useful to keep this in mind as the pressure increases towards the end of a project.

Peter Jones

The Big Picture