9th Grade — Client Simulation: A Full Mini-Project

⏰ Do Now — Start Here

Imagine a client asked you to design something for a new snack brand. What's the FIRST question you'd ask them?

🎯 Today's Big Question

How do we apply everything we've learned -- audience, copyright, project management, and design -- to one small client project?

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

Read a simple client brief and identify the audience, purpose, and constraints.
Apply the 5-step project management process (from Unit 1) to plan the mini-project.
Design a small paper deliverable (flyer, logo sketch, or icon) that meets the brief.

🧰 What You'll Need

Printed sample client briefs (varied, teacher-provided)
Drawing paper
Pencils, rulers

📋 Your Plan for Today

Day 1: Reading the Brief & Planning

Do Now (5 min, above).
Mini-lesson (8 min): review the 5-step project process and client/audience vocabulary from Unit 1.
Independent planning (25 min): read your assigned client brief, identify audience/purpose/constraints, and sketch a plan using the 5 steps.
Share (7 min).

Day 2: Designing the Deliverable

Do Now (5 min): review your plan from yesterday.
Independent build (35 min): design your small paper deliverable (flyer, logo sketch, or icon) that meets the brief.
Share (5 min).

🖨️ Print Your Handout

Word, picture, and definition for today's vocabulary, plus a place to write and draw. Available in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese.

Day 1: EN · ES · FR · AR · ZH
Day 2: EN · ES · FR · AR · ZH

🖥️ 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

Deliverable: The finished piece of work a client expects to receive at the end of a project.

✅ What Your Finished Work Should Include

Deliverable + plan scored against the brief's own requirements.

Exit Ticket: Did your final piece meet the client's brief? What would you change if the client asked for one more revision?

📊 Before You Leave

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

Class Check-In

📤 How You Submit This — For Credit

Your physical projects don't stay in the classroom past the day you finish them -- you're responsible for your own completed work, the same way you'd be responsible for it in any job. The one exception is your class notebook: it has its own designated spot in the room (ask your teacher exactly where), and most students leave it there day to day -- but it's yours, so if you'd rather keep it with you or bring it home to study from, that's your call. Either way, always know where your own notebook actually is. Before a finished physical piece leaves your hands for good: ask your teacher for one of the classroom cameras, photograph your finished (or in-progress) work, then plug that camera's SD card into a classroom computer and upload the photo into your portfolio folder. That uploaded photo, with a short caption, IS your submission for credit -- the photo is what gets kept and graded, not the physical piece.

📁 Portfolio Update — Once a Week

Once a week (e.g. every Friday, or your class's last meeting of the week), photograph or save your best finished or in-progress piece from that week into your portfolio folder (a physical folder for now, or a Google Drive folder once one is set up) with a 1-2 sentence caption: what it is, and one skill it shows. In Grade 10 this becomes your Google Sites portfolio -- keep adding to it weekly from here on so you're not trying to reconstruct a whole semester of work at the end.

✍️ 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 “Client Simulation: A Full Mini-Project.” This project asked: “How do we apply everything we've learned -- audience, copyright, project management, and design -- to one small client project?” I used Deliverable by ______________ (explain how you used it in THIS piece). The hardest part was ______________, and I solved it by ______________. I'm proud of ______________ because ______________.

🎓 ACP Exam Prep

This lesson connects to the Photoshop Adobe Certified Professional exam: Domain 1: Working in the Design Industry

🔗 Want to Learn More?

No extra links for this lesson.

🚀 The Extra Mile

Cross-Class Connection: The same client-brief-to-deliverable process a Business class case study walks through, just applied hands-on.

Career Connection: This entire lesson IS a compressed version of real freelance work in every career on the Careers hub.

Go further -- turn this into a portfolio piece:

Find a real "client" — a teacher, a family member, a small local business — and run this exact process on a real small request. Start here: write the client's request as a one-sentence brief and get them to confirm it's accurate before you start any design.
Turn your finished mini-project into a one-page case study (brief, process, result) for your portfolio. Start here: gather your brief, sketches, process photos, and final piece into one folder before you lay out the case study page.