Using the Creative Brief as a Roadmap in Your Creative Process (and avoid scope creep)

It's really difficult to hit a moving target.

I worked with a client once for probably about four and a half, almost five years.

It was a high-end lifestyle magazine, one of those bi-monthly things that was full of local features and even gossip and profiles of personalities.

With this client, the relationship, the working relationship began very well.

But then it started to run off the rails.

And it was a while before I felt the sense that I was released to basically fire the client.

There was good reason to do that.

And I'm not going to go into why I stayed working with this client for so long.

That's another story for another time.

But one of the problem areas in working with this client was that she, and it was the publisher, was constantly moving the target.

Every issue, six times a year, it would start out one way with one thing, and then she changed this, she changed that, she added this, she removed that.

And the responsibility for doing all the changes fell on me.

It was back in the days before I started using contracts with every client.

And so about halfway through our working relationship, which was probably more than two years into it, I went to her and I said, let's move forward with a contract.

And she refused.

and i still didn't have that sense of it's okay to release the client so i continued working with her and she kept continuing to move the target once i was able to let her go it was an amicable severance and i moved on but one of the things that i moved on with was a resolve to always work with contracts no matter how small the project or the budget always get it in writing up front and signed, and to implement use of the creative brief.

So it's the creative brief that I want to talk about in this episode.

I want to talk about what it is, what its purpose is, and how it's helpful to you as a freelance creative for a variety of reasons.

Primary is your level of professionalism.