SHEEP STUDIO

A brief turns up as a paragraph in an email, a conversation that ran long, or somebody else’s advertisement with the words “like this, but ours”. None of those are briefs yet. They become one when six things are written down and agreed.

• The one thing The single belief a person should come away with, in one sentence. If it takes two, there are two briefs competing.
• Who that person is In words you could say aloud to them, not the name of a segment.
• Where it has to live Every placement the work must appear in. The narrowest one sets the rules for the rest, so it is agreed first.
• What is fixed Legal wording, product names, the spelling of the company — anything that cannot be edited for the sake of a rhythm.
• When it must be out The date the first placement goes live, and who is waiting on it.
• What counts as working Stated before the work exists, by whoever will judge it.

The brief is then written back in a paragraph, sent to whoever gave it, and corrected by them. That exchange is the whole of state one, and where a campaign is usually saved: a brief that cannot be said in one sentence has not finished arriving.

An idea here is a claim about what will change somebody’s mind, and it has to stand up in a room where nobody is on its side. Before anything is made properly it goes through the same five tests, in order.

1. Say it in one line, out loud, to somebody who has not heard the brief. If it needs a run-up, the run-up is the idea and the line is decoration.
2. Take the picture away. If the words alone still carry the claim, it will survive a placement that is nothing but text.
3. Take the words away. If the picture alone carries it, it will survive being seen at a distance, in silence, or with the caption collapsed.
4. Shrink it to the narrowest placement from state one and look at it there first.
5. Say it back from a competitor’s chair. If they can answer with the same sentence and their own name in it, the idea belongs to the category, not to you.

Artwork is built once, big, then taken apart. One master holds the composition at the largest dimension from state one; everything after is a crop of it or a re-setting of its words. Building each placement from nothing instead is how one campaign ends up looking like five campaigns by five people.

The crop surprises people most. A square, an upright full-height frame and a wide banner are not three sizes of one picture; they are three pictures, and the master has to be composed so whatever matters stays inside all of them. Type is proven against the narrowest placement, and the room a logo and a legal line need is left before the picture is finished rather than negotiated afterwards.

Work has to be usable by people who were in none of the conversations — a printer, an in-house designer two years from now — so the release is assembled for a stranger.

The master and every crop

Named so the name alone says what it is: placement, shape, pixel size, version. Anything called final-final is a problem waiting for a deadline.

The words as plain text

Separate from the artwork, so copy can be re-set or corrected without opening a design file.

Colour written down

The values used, in the form the medium needs, rather than left to be sampled off a screenshot.

Fonts, and where they came from

Named with the licence they are used under, so whoever comes next can renew it or substitute knowingly.

An editable version

So the campaign can be changed without coming back to us. Holding artwork hostage is a business model, not a service.

Buying the space and measuring what it did are separate trades, and this studio is not in them. Where a client has a media buyer, the release goes over in that buyer’s own specification. We do not report performance we have not measured.