The best briefs describe problems and constraints. The worst describe solutions.
The best briefs describe problems and constraints. The worst describe solutions.
Say what is not working and for whom. "Enquiries dropped after we changed the pricing page" is worth more than "we need a cleaner pricing page".
Budget, deadline, brand rules, the stakeholder who has to approve, the system it must integrate with. Constraints are not obstacles to good design; they are most of the input.
Every project has immovable pieces. Naming them at the start prevents a round of work that was never going to survive.
"I do not like blue" is hard to act on. "This feels too corporate for our audience" is a note anyone can work with.
The approver who changes their mind late. The legacy system that cannot be touched. The deadline set by somebody outside the project. Designers work around constraints every day; what they cannot work around is discovering them at the end.
Naming them at the start is not an admission of dysfunction. It is the difference between a plan and a wish.
References help enormously when you say what you like about them. "This one, because the pricing is legible at a glance" is actionable. "This one" is a puzzle the designer has to solve by guessing.
Counter-examples are just as useful. Knowing what you have already rejected saves an entire round.
Decide who consolidates comments and how many rounds are included before the work starts. Conflicting feedback from four people arriving separately is the most reliable way to burn a budget.
Most project overruns are approval overruns, not design overruns.
A brief exists to transfer the constraints, not the solution. The most useful ones spend their length on what must be true, who this is for, and what happens if it goes wrong — and leave the how alone.
When a brief specifies the solution, it caps the outcome at whatever the person writing it could already imagine, and it removes the reason for hiring anyone.
The test of a good brief is whether two competent studios could read it and produce genuinely different work that both satisfy it.
Who this is for, described as people rather than demographics. Not twenty-five to forty-four, but the operations manager who is comparing three suppliers on a Friday afternoon and does not want to make a mistake she will have to explain.
What has to change. The measurable thing that is different afterwards, stated in numbers.
What cannot change. Existing brand assets, legal requirements, systems that must be integrated, dates fixed by something outside the project.
What you have already tried, and what happened. This is the most frequently omitted and most useful section in any brief.
Who decides. Not who is consulted — who signs it off.
React to the problem, not the pixel. I do not like the blue gives a designer one option. This feels corporate and we are trying to seem approachable gives them twenty, and they will find a better one than changing the blue.
Separate opinion from requirement, out loud. My preference is X, but I am not the audience is enormously useful information and costs nothing to say.
Consolidate. Six people sending contradictory notes separately produces an average of everyone's taste, which is the definition of a design nobody likes. One person collecting and resolving them first is worth more than any amount of craft downstream.