Bespoke Award Design - What Makes a Good Design Brief?

Bespoke award design – what makes a good design brief? This is something our talented designers work with on a daily basis, so we like to think we’re pretty experienced in knowing what makes a good design brief.  A comprehensive design brief from our clients means that we can get your designs right, or nearly right, first time. We love the opportunity to really ‘go to town’ with the design of your awards, and a really detailed brief gives us the chance to do this.

So, what do we need from you? First of all, we need your event and company logos in vector format, which allows us to change their size without distortion so we can give you the most accurate representation of what your award will look like.  We also need the event name and date, quantity of awards and an idea of the budget for your awards.

The next thing you need to decide is whether you have a preference over the materials your awards are made from? Some people have strong ideas about the materials their awards are made out of, while others are not bothered, and sometimes budget constraints mean we are limited in the type of materials and designs we can offer. Gaudio designs bespoke awards for every customer, but the materials we use most frequently are acrylic, aluminium, wood, recycled glass, or a combination of these.

It is important to consider what values you want to convey with your award, for example, a recycling company might choose to order a ‘sustainable’ award manufactured from wood or recycled glass rather than less ‘environmentally-friendly’ materials.

Stylistic preferences and colours are also important to consider.  If there is a design aspect you would particularly like to see included in your award we need to know.  Equally, if there are any particular ‘dislikes’ and ‘do nots’ we need to know those too. For example, if the budget only stretches to acrylic tablets but one of the company directors hates acrylic, we need to know this. It may be helpful, both from your idea-generating process as well as our design process, to include some example images of other awards you like, or you feel epitomise your event to help us get it right first time.

To summarise, what we need from you:

• Event & company logos in vector format
• Event name, date and budget for the awards
• Material preference
• Values and stylistic preferences of the awards
• Any dislikes or ‘do nots’
• Image examples, if you have them (not always necessary)

Although we feel it is important to have a comprehensive design brief, for various reasons, sometimes clients don’t always have this. Our design team is as experienced working with minimal design briefs but it might just take a little longer to design awards that the clients really love with less of a brief. We do pride ourselves on our customer communication however, and will work closely with customers to create bespoke awards that really epitomise their event even if they don’t really know exactly what they want to start with.

To give us the opportunity to design awards for your events, please contact us now on 01242 232383, email sales@gaudio.co.uk or fill in the ‘contact’ form on our website with as much information as you can provide.