Updated 2026-07-27
When a design project goes badly, the story is usually "they just did not get what I wanted". Nearly every time, what actually happened is that the thing wanted was never written down in a form anyone could act on.
A good brief is short. It is not a specification of what to make — it is a specification of what has to be true when it is finished.
Say what it has to achieve, not what it should look like
"A modern, clean logo" tells a designer nothing — every client says this, and "modern" has meant six different things in the last decade. "Our customers are builders who think we are too expensive; we need to look reliable rather than fancy" tells them everything.
Describe the job the design is doing: who sees it, what they currently think, what they should think instead.
Show examples — including ones you hate
Three things you like and three you do not, each with one sentence about why, is worth more than a page of adjectives. The dislikes are often more useful, because they reveal the constraints nobody thinks to state.
Be careful with competitor examples: "like theirs" usually means "make us look like a follower". Say what you like about it specifically.
State the real constraints early
- Where it must work: tiny on a phone, embroidered on a shirt, printed in one colour, on a van at 60km/h.
- What cannot change: an existing colour, a name, a legal requirement, an established product line.
- The budget and the deadline. Withholding the budget does not get you a better price — it gets you a proposal for the wrong scope.
- Who has to approve it, and when they will be available. Late-arriving opinions destroy more projects than bad taste does.
Instructions that quietly sabotage the work
- "Be creative, do whatever you want" — this is not freedom, it is the absence of a target. You will reject three rounds and nobody will know why.
- "Make it pop" — a symptom, not a note. Something is not prominent enough; say what a viewer is failing to notice.
- Sending a sketch of your own solution instead of the problem. You will get your sketch, executed neatly, and it will still not work.
- Design by committee forwarding — five people's contradictory comments pasted into one email. Consolidate into one voice with one decision-maker.
The one-page test
Your brief should fit on a page and answer five things: who this is for, what it must make them do or believe, where it will appear, what cannot change, and how you will judge whether it worked.
If you cannot answer the last one, that is the real problem, and no designer can solve it for you. That is worth an hour of thinking before you spend money on anyone's time.