1. Background

A Short Overview

• Who are you?
• What do you do?
• A little bit of history/background?

*If you’re a start-up, imagine you’re writing an elevator pitch; can you get the most important points across in 75 words or less*

2. Budget and Deadline

I mean, it’s best to get this out of the way right?

You can save time and energy for both you and us if you provide your budget, we will instantly be able to tell you that

1. This budget is unrealistic for what you want to achieve and we can’t work with you.
   -OR-
2. This sounds great, we’ll provide a proposal for you to review.

Which puts you as a client in a much better situation moving forward either way.

We understand you may not know exactly, but outlining your budget, even specifying a price range, however vague, and an estimated deadline can in turn bring a more detailed and more accurate quote in response. You may be trying to launch the new design in line with a new product launch, opening, or seasonal event, so we can let you know if your vision is realistic within a certain timeframe.

3. Your target audience

This is crucial for our process of understanding the user. If you’re an existing brand, you may have some of this thinking in-house already, you should think about?

• Who are we designing for?
• Try to describe your ideal customer
• Go deeper into demographics, e.g. age, income, education, and employment

If you have specific demographic data, even better! This could come in the form of Google Analytics, Search Console etc.

4. Your current design

If you have an existing design or an old design that hasn’t seen the light of day for years, we want to hear the good, the bad & the ugly:

• What is working?
• What’s not?
• What needs to be improved?
• Are there any elements you’d like to retain?

More often than not, it’s very clear to us what these are, but there may be key things you’re looking for more or less of…

Some design elements are subjective, so we’d like to hear your opinions early on in the project to see if we are on the same path. Don’t worry, they don’t have to be technical opinions.

5. Main Aims and Objectives

Aside from looking great, we want to know the overall goals of your new design and your vision, what are the objectives of your new design? They could be:

• To increase brand awareness
• To increase customer engagement
• To promote a new service/product
• To generate more sales
• To have a more simplified user experience

You may already be a step ahead and know exactly what you’re expecting with your new design, you may even have a new idea planned – brilliant! The goals of your new design may be pretty straightforward, but once we’re clear on your design goals – you can leave it with us!

6. Competitors

It goes without saying, that you probably know your market better than we do (we’d hope so anyway!) 

Although we do a thorough research phase into competitors and similar industries, it’s great to get your opinion and any insight you may have. You need to decide, are you trying to stand out from the crowd, or fit in and play it safe? There’s no right or wrong answer, it’s all dependent on what you want to achieve! You should create a list of your competitors and give your opinions of elements such as:

• What are they doing right?
• What are they doing wrong?
• Do you like the look and feel?
• Does the layout give you a headache?
• Do you like some of their functionality?
• Do you like a certain element?

7. Designs you like

Looking at designs is not limited to competitors or even competitors that operate in your industry. You may already have a list of designs you aspire to or like certain elements of. We’d LOVE to hear them! Give a few examples of sites that you like and explain why, for example:

• Color Scheme
• Navigation
• Typography
• Animation
• Is it clean and minimalistic?
• Is it experimental?

Ultimately, What does a successful design look like to you?

8. Branding and Marketing

Brand Direction

Part of designing involves brand direction – even if you need to keep a logo, we can transform the look and feel of your brand through color, typography, etc. If you’re open to this, this is helpful for us so we can design with a fresh set of eyes and with no limitations:

• How far can we push your brand?
• Do you want to update the colors?
• Do you want to update the typography?
• Do you have certain assets you’d like to use such as illustrations or photography?

We may be able to answer these questions for you but we must be all on the same page. 

What Happens Next?

We get to work…