The poster brief
My vision of an ideal brief has the following:
-a personal touch
-a familiar client
-informality
-a definite deadline
-ability to go deep and do research
-a supportive network
.. and like Panu said, contact persons and responsibilities should be clearly divided. So, here's an imaginary letter that contains my next go at the brief.
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From:
Prof. Inoto Suke
Department of Linguistics
643 Camelot Hall
Queen's University
London, LND 24002 England
To: Mikko
Hi, Mikko. How are you?
We have a new brief for you. Good timing, because you're completely broke as always, I guess. This one came up at the department meeting last week.
Our lecturers need to help new students with understanding the Japanese written characters, the Kanji. Normally we do it by discussion, letting the people do their own research and discuss the results in a seminar. However, that approach leaves them confused .. it seems like the problem is getting an overview of what they need to memorize, in what order, and some straightforward way of making a sense out of how you are progressing.
So, we want to put it all in a single wall chart. A giant poster thingy, that covers the lessons and methods in the teaching material we use here. The book is called 'Remembering the Kanji' by James W. Heisig. I sent you a copy.
The work is huge, of course .. so we don't expect you to come up with a final solution. Do a visual prototype poster of the first 2-3 lessons in the book, and develop a design document for a NodeBox application, that expands on the same theme and makes it interactive. Keep it nice and compact, stay out of the implementation details for now.
So, the printed poster will contain an expanded visualization of all the Kanji in at least a single Heisig lesson, we will let you decide the content details, how, what and where.
We want it on the wall, and we want it both elegant and informative. It needs to be pretty, to invite rather than repel the newcomer. It also needs to be effective, to be of real help to our dedicated students. They are english speakers, around 20-40 years of age.
We want it as a poster first, so we can test it, and recover some of the costs by selling copies of it later. The size would be good as A1, or A2 if you must cut it down for the proto.
Get back to me as soon as you read this, it needs to be done next week by thursday. Yeah, I know. Shit happens. But hey, we're paying you by the hour. And one more thing: no elephants in the poster. You heard me.
Tsup.
.Inoto