12th Grade — Building Our Intake System: The Client Request Form

⏰ Do Now — Start Here

Think back to the Client & Designer unit from earlier grades. What questions should we always ask before starting a job?

🎯 Today's Big Question

How do teachers, admin, and other staff actually request a design job from our studio?

📈 By the End of Today, You Will Be Able To

Design a client request form/process capturing what's needed, purpose, audience, and deadline.
Explain why a clear intake process protects both the studio and the client from miscommunication.
Share the finished intake system with school staff.

🧰 What You'll Need

Computer with Google Forms/Docs
Sample client-brief templates (from Grade 9/11 Unit 1)

📋 Your Plan for Today

Day 1: Design the Form

Do Now (5 min): what questions should we always ask before starting a job? Mini-lesson (8 min): what a good intake form needs to capture.
Build (27 min): as a class, build an intake form/request process capturing the requester's info, what they need, purpose, audience, and deadline.
Share draft (5 min).

Day 2: Publish & Share

Do Now (5 min).
Finalize (20 min): review and polish the form.
Plan rollout (10 min): decide how staff will be told it exists (email, flyer, staff meeting announcement).
Pilot (10 min): share it with a few staff members as a pilot and note their first reactions.

🖥️ Today's Slide Deck

Short, on-the-board pacing slides — project these to follow along. (The full details are in the handout above, not here.)

Day 1

⬇️ Open / download this slide PDF

Day 2

⬇️ Open / download this slide PDF

📚 Key Words

Intake: The process of formally receiving and recording a new request before work begins.
Client Brief: A written summary of what a client needs, why, for whom, and by when.
Turnaround Time: How long a studio needs to complete a job from request to delivery.

✅ What Your Finished Work Should Include

Intake form tested with at least one real or mock request before being shared school-wide.

Exit Ticket: What is one question on our intake form that you think will save the studio the most time or trouble later?

📊 Before You Leave

Quick, anonymous class check-in -- takes less than a minute.

Class Check-In

📁 Portfolio Update — Once a Week

Once a week, add your best finished or in-progress yearbook (or, later, studio) work to your portfolio with a 1-2 sentence caption -- and once you're in the Design Studio phase, a photo of the piece in its real, installed location if possible. This is the same evidence trail you'll use for Archive & Portfolio and any PBAT/portfolio review.

✍️ Example description for your Google Sites portfolio (fill in YOUR blanks -- don't just copy this):

For this piece, I made ______________ (name what you made) for “Building Our Intake System: The Client Request Form.” This project asked: “How do teachers, admin, and other staff actually request a design job from our studio?” I used Intake by ______________ (explain how you used it in THIS piece). The hardest part was ______________, and I solved it by ______________. I'm proud of ______________ because ______________.

🔗 Want to Learn More?

No extra links for this lesson.

🚀 The Extra Mile

Cross-Class Connection: The same form-design thinking a Computer Science class covers building a simple digital form.

Career Connection: Client intake systems are literal infrastructure in every professional Advertising & Marketing studio.

Go further -- turn this into a portfolio piece:

Test your intake form with three real staff members submitting a request, then revise based on what confused them. Start here: hand your form to one staff member right now, before scheduling the full test with three, and watch exactly where they hesitate.
Design a promotional one-pager announcing the studio's services to the rest of the school — real internal marketing material. Start here: list the studio's actual services in one sentence each before laying out any part of the one-pager.