The creative brief has a long history, particularly in advertising. Its purpose is to provide a creative team with a working document that helps them understand key information and insights about a project. It is not meant as a place to propose creative ideas or strategies. Rather, it ensures that everyone has a clear understanding of what objectives the creative solution is supposed to meet. Being able to manage a process like this through document design and use is a critical part of working in a communication field.
There are a lot of interesting discussions about and controversy about creative briefs, so I’ve curated a site on Scoop.it on creative briefs. We will discuss some of these examples in class and I’d like you to work with ideas from the resources here to design the format for your creative brief: http://www.scoop.it/t/creative-briefs
At either Scoop.it! or Redux, find the work of three curators who are meeting the standards of excellent curation as we discussed them in class. Your job is to evaluate (in writing to be posted in Basecamp) how well they:
- define their topic
- locate and select appropriate content
- define and connect with their audience
- connect different kinds of content
- illuminate patterns or trends that might be of interest to their audience
- create a space for learning about this topic
- make use of social network tools to further their readership
I encourage you to look for topics of interest to you because you will be best able to evaluate the success of these curators.
We have been collecting information about the Humanities website since last February so you will have an entire year of data to look at with regard to your area of the site. To access the data, log into Google using the username and password on the handout that I gave you in class. Go to:
http://www.google.com/analytics
Follow the instructions on my handout in order to make custom reports for your different areas. They should be available on the Dashboard by the time you get back from Spring Break.
For additional resources on GA, Smashing Magazine has a very helpful resource page on working with this tool. Please feel free to email me more if you find them and I’ll add them to the site.