me studio

i couldn’t even hazard a guess as to the amount of briefings i’ve seen in my career as a designer/art director and they, of course, have ranged from the mind-numbingly boring, to amusing, to misguided to the overly ‘scientific’ (with hundreds of pages of research attached), there have been some short and imaginative ones too but usually speaking the more money involved the less imaginative a briefing becomes… clients have often felt the need to tell me exactly what i should make (even what colour font and direction a design should go in) even though they hire me to make those decisions on their behalf based on the fact that that is my profession

it’s not always like that though and since i left the world of overpaid advertising agencies and decided to go it alone, things have become quite a bit more down-to-earth, personal and perhaps realistic in terms of how dominant the clients are in defining what they need/want… a good thing, i promise you

the following briefing which i received by mail this week however, is untypical, i had to read it several times before it fully made sense but it goes roughly like this (i will paraphrase the actual email)

good morning
september the 1st: seems like a good day to get started, we’ve finally decided to stick to the name we had, i think we should focus the identity around a logo and keep the rest fairly neutral i quite liked this website (there was a link) and stuff that’s fairly light and spacious, with a tactile quality to it and the text just flowing away from it, a bit like the stuff you did for…. the logo doesn’t necessarily need to be graphic and doesn’t really need to contain the name

as for an exact list…. we need the usual stuff you’d expect for a housestyle, well you know… you’ve done this before more often than us… anyway good luck and we’d like to get started in early october.

it’s probably my favourite briefing thus far and at the same time one of the most challenging i’ve had…. no research, no self imposed restrictions and not even any "dont’s" my interpretation of what it says, you see, goes roughly like this:

we trust you, you have a lot of freedom and we want you to make something beautiful for us, thanks…

i’ll do my best… thanks