Ray Pettersson

Top Tips When Briefing a Designer

Ray Pettersson — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:00:14 PST

Writing a briefing can it be considered a challenge in itself. Specially If you are a business-owner with no marketing background or someone who just started working with freelance designers. Nevertheless, a design briefing is an essential document for the design process. To help you with this task I compiled a list with the top tips you can use when briefing a designer.

Make yourself easy to understand.

There are plenty of information that are easy to understand by you, but it’s not obvious to your designer. Don’t expect the designer to be a mind reader. If you’re using jargons that are particular to your business industry, make sure you explain them in the briefing.

Remember that your interpretation of visual concepts can be different of your designer’s interpretation. How do you explain what is traditional or funky? The best way is by showing your designer examples of publications that have a similar look and feel to the effect that you would like to see on your project. The more visual material you can use to communicate your ideas the better.

If you’re hiring a designer, don’t be a designer.

Don’t ask your designer to do a job for you and start doing it yourself. When writing your briefing, concentrate on the marketing point-of-view of your project and leave the design work to be done by the designer. If you’re using your designer just to materialize your ideas, you’re getting no value for money and misusing your designer potential.

When writing your briefing, don’t make it so restrictive that there is no room for your designer to be creative. Instead, write a briefing focusing on the results you want to achieve and leave enough space for your designer to present you with ideas. You will be surprised and the results will be great for your business.

Writing is better than talking.

If you normally brief your designer face-to-face or over the phone, make sure you also keep a written version of your briefing. Send it to your designer as a formalization of your conversation. If you remembered something after sending it to your designer, avoid the temptation of just calling and telling him of the changes over the phone. Include the changes in your written version and send it again.

The best and easy way to keep a channel of communication with your designer is by email or – if you’re tech savvy – by waves. It saves a lot of time and money if you and the designer know where to go to check something that has been discussed before. When you have a written document, you both can reach an agreement much more easily. Even the most perfect relationship between client and designer can be ruined because of a misunderstanding.

Plan ahead before briefing a designer.

If you want to have value for money, make sure you schedule the whole project before you brief a designer. Be certain that the quicker you need your project finished, the higher the price will be. Even the most simple design project involves different stages like production of the first revision, adjustments, corrections, approval and final delivery. Always ask your designer to inform you in advance if the deadlines or set budgets you’re proposing are unrealistic.

How to Write a Design Briefing?

Ray Pettersson — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:00:27 PST

When you’re working with a designer, it’s essential to write a detailed briefing before the beginning of your project. Writing a detailed briefing will guarantee that you will get the results you want saving money and time on the process. It is trough the briefing that business owners and marketing professionals know exactly the results they want to achieve, and it’s where the designers will look for to acquire the necessary information to do their work.

Keep in mind that the briefing is a valuable part of the designing process and should be dealt with care. The more information you provide to your designer, the better results you will get. An easy way of preparing yourself to write a briefing it’s by thinking in a series of questions and answers about your organization and your project. To help you start writing your briefing I wrote a few questions on tree aspects every briefing must have. Take a look.

Company Profile

What are your business services and/or products?
What is your company history?
What are your business strengths and weaknesses?
What are your strategic goals? Who are your main competitors?
How does your brand differ from your competitors?
Who are your customers?
What are your target market’s demographics and psychographics?
Who is the target audience? e.g. “male, 20-28, students of the english language.”

It’s quite important for you to try to avoid using jargons when talking about your company, products and services. The designer will use theses answers to create a mindset to work in your project, so try to be as clear as possible.

Project Goals

How do you want your business to perceived by your target audience?
What kind of reaction do you expect from your target?
What kind of impression you expect your target to have from you design?
What are the key messages do you want to deliver?
What results do you want to get from this project?

Project Guidelines

What exactly type of work you want? What is the format?
If it’s a print job. What are the print requirements?
What are the information that must be included in this project?
Do you want this project to fit in a previous existing style? If yes, do you have samples of it?
There are any requirements that need consideration?
Who are the people who will work with the designer?
What are the deadlines on this project?
What is the project budget?

If you are a designer and you’re dealing with a client that does not know how to write a design briefing, try to help by submitting to your client a design briefing template. That will show you’re professional and will save you both time and money.

How to Prevent Wordpress From Adding
Tags?

Ray Pettersson — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 22:00:36 PST

Recently I created my first theme for WordPress and after a fresh install I was eager to start writing my first post. Guess what happened? An odd
tag kept appearing every time I jump a line with the Enter key.

After spending a fair amount of time looking at every corner of the WordPress back-end looking for a stop-adding-br-tags option without success, I did some research on the WordPress Help Center and confirmed the obvious, there is no such option.

Since my tweaking knowledge of WordPress is still limited, I was hoping that someone else had already found the solution. A few keywords later I hit Simon Battersby Blog that presented a relatively painless solution. Simon has found a variable inside the “formatting.php” file which allows you to turn off this annoying feature.

To fix this, download “formatting.php” from your server and search for the function “wpautop” in your text editor. You will find this:

function wpautop($pee, $br = 1)

Change it to this:

function wpautop($pee, $br = 0)

Then save the file, publish it back to your server and presto, no more annoying
tags! Works fine in WordPress version 2.9, but remember to change again if you update WordPress since it will restore the file to the original setting.

Most Popular Add-ons for Firefox

Ray Pettersson — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 22:00:04 PST

One impressive thing about Firefox is the massive amount of add-ons that can take your browsing experience to a whole different level. I particularly use some Firefox add-ons to help me with design and development projects. However, It doesn’t matter how do you surf the web, there are so many add-ons that you can easily find one that fits your needs.

On previous articles, I compiled a list with the best Firefox add-ons for web design and the best Firefox add-ons for web development. Nevertheless, there still are some add-ons that don’t match those two categories but are extremely powerful. Take a look at some of the most popular add-ons for Firefox.

Delicious

Delicious bookmarks – formerly know as del.icio.us – is the perfect tool to manage your bookmarks online. It integrates your bookmarks with Firefox and keeps them in sync for easy and convenient access.

HootSuite

Hootsuite is the definitive Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn client. You can manage multiple accounts in just one easy-to-use interface. With the Hootlet Firefox Add-on you can share a URL – which is automatically shortened – on any of these social networks with just one click.

FoxClocks

FoxClocks it’s a lovely add-on if you want to keep an eye on the time around the world, It automatically inserts small clocks on your browser status bar. It’s the ideal companion for freelancers who have clients in different parts of the world.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a fantastic tool to help you find stunning websites. The more you use the better recommendations you receive. With this add-on, this experience gets even better.

Wisestamp

WiseStamp is a tool to create HTML email signatures that can be use in Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, AOL and other webmail services. It’s the perfect tool to give a professional look and feel to your email signatures.

Ebay

This add-on is a fantastic tool to help you can keep an eye on your eBay activity. It’s official tool built by eBay with its own users in mind. It creates a dynamic sidebar with the items you are are selling or the ones you are eager to buy.

Best Firefox Addons for Web Development

Ray Pettersson — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:00:54 PST

Firefox has a enormous collection of add-ons that can entirely change the way you surf the web. If you’re a web developer, you will be glad to know that many of these are add-ons are built with you in mind. I’ve been using some of these add-ons and decided to compile a list with the best Firefox add-ons for web development. However, if you are a web designer, check the best Firefox add-ons for web design.

Firebug

Firebug is by far the most popular web development tool for Firefox. It provide powerful tools to edit, debug, and inspect HTML, CSS and JavaScript live in any web page.

CodeBurner

CodeBurner is a superb companion to Firebug Firefox add-on. It integrates seamlessly with Firebug extending it with reference material for HTML and CSS.

YSlow

YSlow is another excellent addition for Firebug Firefox add-on. It checks the performance of web pages based on the rules set by Yahoo and report back how can you make it faster.

Web Developer

The Web Developer add-on is quite popular among web designers and developers. It has some useful tools to develop websites.

FireFTP

FireFTP is a quite effective FTP client add-on for Mozilla Firefox. It’s fast and extremely easy-to-use.

Best Firefox Addons for Web Design

Ray Pettersson — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:00:42 PST

Firefox has a vast collection of add-ons that can entirely change the way you surf the web. If you’re a web designer, you will be pleased to know that many of these are add-ons are built with you in mind. I’ve been using some of these add-ons and decided to compile a list with the best Firefox add-ons for web design. However, if you are a web developer, check the best Firefox add-ons for web development.

ColorZilla

ColorZilla is the best friend of any web designer. With useful tools like an advanced eyedropper, a color picker and a measuring tool you will save a lot of time on your design projects.

GridFox

GridFox is a great Firefox addon that allows you to overlay a customizable grid on top of a website. This is a brilliant tool to check designs that follow a grid-based layout.

Abduction!

Abduction is a cool extension that allows you to take screenshots of your web pages. Excellent when you need a whole page screenshot to add in your portfolio.

MeasureIt

MeasureIt it’s a fairly convenient add-on that creates a ruler on top of the browser page, so you can verify width, height and alignment of its content.

Dummy Lipsum

Dummy Lipsum is Firefox add-on that generates “Lorem Ipsum” dummy text taken from Lorem Ipsum website. When the cursor is in a form field, a menu option appears in the context menu.