Studio Sondar is a creative studio for branding and web projects. They are a small team of curious creatives with ambitious ideas that bring thought and style to forward-thinking brands. The team at Studio Sondar believe every voice deserves to be heard, and they thrive on helping those with a vision and passion for what they do and who they do it for.
Based in North Adelaide, they design and create beautiful brands and websites through a process that empowers clients, asks questions and brings ideas to life.
Everyone in the team is involved in major decisions, and everyone has the freedom to work in the location and style that suits their creativity and productivity best. The result is a community of clients who have truly collaborated on a unique brand and web journey, and who remain a long-term part of the Studio Sondar community.
The collaborative process over at Studio Sondar for as well as branding as web projects always starts with a discovery and strategic thinking workshop in which the team digs deep to understand everything about their client’s project, the business and their ideal customers.
Through these workshops, they take the time to fully and truly understand who their clients are, why they do what they do and the ethos that is built around their business. Then using what they learn, they translate their clients vision into something that is purposeful and truly speaks to the end user. Something to be deeply proud of.
Challenge
The software the team at Studio Sondar Creative used to prepare and host their discovery workshops was Google Docs, which felt very uninspired and didn't feel like it actually fed into a creative process that they could host a workshop around.
Using Google Docs felt unprofessional and not at all how they wanted to be perceived by their clients. On top of this they weren't getting the deeper information that they really needed to bring everything together far beyond people's expectations. As Terri Williams, Director at the agency shares:
“I was originally using a Google Docs template that I'd created based on all of the agencies I'd been involved in, but it wasn't really diving on the WHY which I think is the core of everything.”
How HolaBrief helps
Terri and her team found out that HolaBrief’s discovery templates asked so many of the questions they never had actually thought of, in a way that was interactive as well as easy to read through. They loved the interactive elements like the Position Mapping and User Personas, while the moodboard was another addition that was immensely helpful for their clients to tie down a look and feel.
Thanks to HolaBrief they could walk clients through the client discovery workshop in a way that made more sense to them visually. A process that would otherwise be quite overwhelming by the pure amount of information, was now made easily understandable.
After the discovery workshop, when all information was added to their HolaBrief template, it became a guiding document for the entire team to refer back to during the entire project lifecycle.
HolaBrief: How easy was it to onboard and integrate HolaBrief into your business?
Terri Williams, Director at Studio Sondar: Super easy, we didn't really watch any videos, we just sort of knew what was happening intuitively and didn't really have any issues figuring out what to do.
What recommendations do you have for others considering?
I'd recommend HolaBrief for streamlining the whole strategic client discovery process for your team and your clients, while having one place that your team can use as a guiding document for design and development. It also pairs well as an interactive activity tool for helping clients understand what user personas are, and making it fun along the way. Then, your team can access your brief by link any time.
When switching from Google Docs to HolaBrief, I found that our client discoveries became significantly more in depth, more efficient (not so much in time, but in the value provided) and gave us a huge head-start on project deliverables in a way that resulted in extremely happy customers. It makes the clients have fun in the process as well.
How would you rate HolaBrief?
4.5/5
