A good brief is the single biggest factor in whether a creative project goes well. More than the budget, more than the timeline, more than the talent of the studio you hire. We have worked from briefs that were one paragraph and briefs that were forty pages, and neither extreme is ideal. Here is what actually works.
Start with the problem, not the solution ¶
The most common brief mistake is leading with the deliverable rather than the problem. 'We need a new logo' is not a brief. 'We are losing credibility with enterprise clients because our brand looks like a startup from 2014' is a brief. The first tells us what you want. The second tells us why, and the why is where good creative work starts.
Be specific about the audience ¶
Not 'small business owners aged 25-45.' That describes roughly a third of the working population. The more specific you can be, the better the work will be. What do they read? What do they distrust? What are they trying to avoid? What does a good day look like for them? The brief does not need to be a full persona document, but it should give us enough to make decisions.
Tell us what success looks like ¶
Not in metrics necessarily, though those help. In feeling. 'We want people to feel like we are the grown-up option in a crowded market' is useful. 'We want to increase conversion by 12%' is also useful, but it is a different kind of useful. Both together is ideal. Give us a way to evaluate whether the work is doing what you need it to do.
Include the constraints upfront ¶
Budget, timeline, existing assets you want to keep, stakeholders who need to approve things, brand guidelines you are locked into. Constraints are not obstacles to creativity, they are the shape of the problem. A studio that knows the constraints upfront will design within them. A studio that finds out about them in week three will redesign around them, which costs everyone time.
If you are not sure how to write a brief, we send a short brief template to every new enquiry. It takes about twenty minutes to fill in and it makes the whole project go faster.