We were recently invited to tender for the production of a school prospectus. Nothing unusual about that, we have done a few and although we don’t usually have to pitch for this kind of work, we didn’t mind in this case as it was a cracking one to have a go at and, after all, we had approached this school a while back as part of a direct mailing to encourage that sort of work.

So far so good, and we received a detailed brief telling us nearly everything we needed to know to do the job properly. I say nearly, because I felt a site visit was worth it to fill in a few gaps and to give me a feel for the place.

We did a thorough job - it is simply not worth doing anything other than a thorough job if you really want to win the work - but this sort of work takes a lot of man hours and resources.

As a slight digression here, it is worth making mention of the merits and morals of pitching: it has become the industry standard to ‘invite’ selected design agencies to pitch for projects along the lines of an ad agency pitching for an account. The trouble is, in an ad agency situation you may be pitching a couple of grands’ worth to win a multi-million pound account; if you are pitching for a one-off design project, exactly what is the prize?

Anyway, to get back to the subject, we assumed - as one would from being in this situation many times before - that we were one of, say, four or possibly five (at maximum) agencies pitching against each other. Why would you assume anything else? Who has the time to invite and select more than that? Perhaps I am being naïve here, but after all these years I have sort of come to know what to expect in these things.

I’ll bet you know where I’m heading with this one.

So, we put together a fab proposal, some really creative stuff with all the bells and whistles, written report and full costings to go with it, perhaps about 75 man hours in total.

No, we didn’t win - again we have been here often enough to know that in a five-horse race, there can only be one winner and four losers. And it doesn’t really matter if you come second, to be honest, because you might as well be at the bottom of the lost when it comes to end results. We’ve won some of these, and lost others; it happens. And we were happy that we had done a good job, even if it wasn’t exactly what they wanted to see.

What did surprise and shock me rather was to hear that we were one of 17 (yes, seventeen) agencies invited to pitch, and this to make the shortlist. I was so dumbstruck that I didn’t have time to even feel sorry for myself before experiencing every other kind of emotion, from anger to frustration and onwards to having a good laugh.

Is this really a professional way to conduct business? A colleague of ours, when told this story, reacted with the following words: “If any major PLC asked 17 agencies to pitch for an account worth millions they would be lambasted”.

I can’t help agreeing with him. Next time, I won’t be so naïve as to not ask the question: “How many are playing on this pitch?”.

To have a blog is one thing - but to have a blog that actually looks like your website is infinitely better, isn’t it? It’s taken a while but Stuart and David W got their heads together today and the result is a blog that actually fits within our brand. Well done, chaps.

All this leads on nicely to the gentle art of Consistency of Brand. In the days when a brand was a make of cornflakes or shoe polish and corporate identity was what has now become branding, it was always the inconsistency of logos, fonts, colours, styles that let most good identities down. Just because the methods have changed it doesn’t mean the problems have, though. What we now have is the same old problem - different promo items seem to have sprung from different places by different routes and with varying results.

End result - inconsistency.

Part of our job is to co-ordinate all those items - stationery, exhibition materials, literature, clothing, gifts, ads, website etc. so they all look as though they come from the same place.

It’s not really rocket science, more joined up thinking, but it does elude some people.

Next time you think ’should this flyer match that folder?’ the answer is probably ‘yes’.

Having spent 30 years running a graphic design studio, I look back on the changes in our industry in awe - how did we manage all those massive transitions, especially in the early 90s when the drawing board gave way to the Apple Mac, the Rotring pen to the mouse, the fax machine to the internet?

Is it any easier now, to take a brief and produce a piece of promotional literature, than it was in 1977? Of course it is. For a start, neither the NGA nor the repro house have a strangle hold on our industry any more. Not that either were that bad, but things have changed and we now have virtually total control over what we design. We dictate how something should appear in print or on the screen, not a third party. And that means that we can be flexible, creative and innovative.

True, many young designers seem incapable of actually drawing with a pencil and paper, but does that really matter? How many young scientists can use a slide rule?

Recently , a few of us Grumpy Old Designers got together to have a good moan about the way things have moved on and how much we miss the smell of the Pantone marker, the feel of the Cow Gum rubber as you throw it across the room and the days when you had to have a degree in maths to copyfit. We call ourselves GODS (a bit presumptuous, granted, bit it is a bit tongue in cheek) and meet occasionally for a beer and a chinwag .

In all seriousness, though, we do learn something new every day and that’s what makes this job interesting. And I get to meet new people all the time from many different industries - from cosmetics to yacht racing, from satellites to insurance, they all have one thing in common - the need for a reliable, efficient, creative studio to supply them with all their promotional items.

I am keen to understand how different businesses tick and how we should adapt to their needs. I reckon I have another ten useful years in this business before I hand over the reins to younger and wiser people. By that time this Grumpy Old Designer will be getting his bus pass and Grumpiness may be a thing of the past as I get to the stage called ‘Beyond Caring’. In the meantime, however, I welcome change as long as there’s a good reason for it and a meaningful end result.

For the first time ever I was asked by a new client the other day if we had such a thing as a template for a brief. My immediate reaction was “of course not, all projects are bespoke and so different you couldn’t possibly have a ‘one size fits all’ brief to cover any new job”.

This set me thinking, though - quite often the old joke about it being good to have tight briefs is rather true. Certainly better tight than woolly.

These days, a brief can range from a quick phone call saying “we need another one of those brochure thingies you did for us, same style, buzz you through the copy in a mo, need it for a show next Tuesday” to a full blown, pre-tender questionnaire with as much burocratic red tape attached to it as a local authority can muster and a very large envelope to return the stuff in by the due date.

Today I received a written instruction from a long-standing client who has perfected the art of writing a succinct brief and his one paragraph says it all: purpose, size, colours, production spec, when/how/where required and so on. He is in the minority in this skill. To write a good, tight brief without it being too prescriptive at one one extreme (we are creatives, after all) or open-ended at the other (resulting in “no, that’s not what we had in mind at all”) is not that easy.

So this set me thinking about how we could design a template for a brief; I’m sure this exists out there already, it’s just not something we have been asked for before. So what do we need to know?

1. Working/proper title (eg XYZ Show exhibition stand)

2. Description (eg 4 x 3 pop-up system)

3. Purpose (general text or image description, background information and so on)

4. Detailed specification (eg size, colours, typefaces, orientation, production process etc.)

5. When required by (nearly always wanted in a hurry, so important)

6. Delivery requirements (if a large consignment, can it be received on a pallet, for instance?)

7. Other information (eg similar to job no. 12345 from last May)

This is only a rough first draft so I’ve probably left something out - or perhaps put too much in. And I’m sure any marketing man or woman worth their salt will point me in the direction of the official template that has existed for years which we could adapt.

However, it is a start.

So let me know, from your point of view, what you think should go into a brief to ensure that we receive sufficient instruction to to do the job without either being bogged down in paper, or have us reaching for the phone to ask some pretty fundamental questions before we can proceed.