How the work moves
The opening page of this site names the four states a brief passes through. This one describes the joins between them — the handovers where work in an advertising studio is most often lost, and the habits SHEEP STUDIO LTD uses to stop that happening. None of it is a secret method. It is ordinary discipline, written down so that you can hold us to it.
From the question to the answer: one sentence, agreed
Nothing is drawn while the brief is still a conversation. The join between state one and state two is a single written sentence — the belief a person should come away with — sent back to whoever gave us the brief, in our words rather than theirs. Putting it in our words is the point: if we have misheard, the sentence will be wrong in a way that is obvious to them and invisible to us, and five minutes of disagreement now saves a fortnight of beautiful work pointed at the wrong idea.
Where a brief contains two beliefs, we say so and ask which one is being bought. Where it contains none — which happens, and is not a criticism of anybody — we go back a step and help write one before quoting for anything.
From the answer to the artwork: rough first, on purpose
Ideas are shown rough. Flat type, stand-in imagery drawn by hand, no finish at all. A thought presented at full polish is almost impossible to reject politely, and a client who feels unable to reject it will say yes to something they do not believe in and then spend four weeks asking for changes that are really the original disagreement coming back in disguise.
So the rough stage is deliberately ugly, and we say what each element will become. If the idea survives being shown badly, it is strong enough to make properly. If it only works once it has been made beautifully, it was never the idea — the craft was.
Inside the making: one master, then crops
Artwork is produced once at the largest dimension the campaign needs, and every placement after that is a crop or a re-set of that single file. The crop tool on the opening page exists because this is where surprises live: a composition that sings as a wide banner can lose its entire subject when the same picture is cut to an upright full-height frame, and the arithmetic of what gets lost is worth looking at before the picture is composed rather than after.
Type sizes are proven against the narrowest placement on the agreed list. Space for a logo and any legally required line is reserved while the layout is still loose. Files are named so that the name alone identifies the placement, the shape and the version, which is what makes a campaign still usable by somebody who joins the client’s team a year later.
Revision rounds, counted out loud
Two rounds of changes are assumed in any piece of work, and they are described before we start: the first gathers everything, the second confirms it. A third round is not a crisis, but it is a conversation about why rather than a silent absorption of cost, because silent absorption is how studios come to resent the people paying them.
Changes are collected from one person on the client side. Not because other opinions do not matter, but because reconciling three contradictory sets of notes is a job somebody has to do, and it is cheaper and faster when it is done by the people who share an office than by us guessing at the hierarchy.
Afterwards: who holds what
When a campaign is released, the client receives the master, every crop, the words as plain text, the colour values, the typefaces named with their licence terms, and an editable version. What they own and what they licence is written into the agreement for the work before it starts, in plain sentences, including any imagery that is licensed rather than made.
Buying media space and measuring its results are separate trades. This studio makes the work and hands it over to whoever places it, in that buyer’s own specification. We will tell you where our competence stops; it is a short conversation and a more useful one than the alternative.
If that sounds like the way you would want a job run, the next step is one sentence sent to studio@sheepstudio.buzz.