Client Project! Tutorial #1

During today's tutorial we discussed firstly the client live project and where we were with that and that we should be in the process of finalising the client so we are ready in advance. That our client must be reliable and where possible well known or established so we are able to receive a reference from them. We discussed that the most successful clients would be a business or foundation as they already have a sense of business so it will make working with them easier whereas if you are working with someone less established they tend to leave you to do ALL the work and give very little input or time. Therefore I am thinking of moving away from my original client idea of a small self run photography business to avoid the previous issues!

It was suggested that we should keep minutes of meetings with clients and that we should provide ourselves and the client with deadlines so we both know what is to be completed and when, therefore practicing good time management.

We also defined the differences between the two projects. The simulated project allows us to be creative and explore whereas the client project allows us to become aware of client needs and learn to solve problems within practice.

The second part of the tutorial was spent looking over the brief and getting a more in depth feel of what was actually expected of us. We began to discuss who we thought the company was representing and what exactly the message was they were trying to put across and possible audiences we thought we could target. From this we decided that the company would either be working from the government or the publisher and we had to decide which route we would work from for our designs. It was also suggested we think about whether our site would be a stand alone site or a link from a main company site so we could start to think about the message we were trying to convey within it. And finally we discussed the interactive ideas and that perhaps we should look into visual interactives to help convey our message to the user.

We left the tutorial with 3 questions in mind...

1. Who is running the site?
2. Who is the target audience?
3. Are we discussing all medias or focusing on one in particular?