How to write a design brief that actually gets you better work

A brief that says "modern, clean, professional" tells a designer nothing. Every client says it, and it rules out almost nothing. Meanwhile the genuinely useful information — who you lose deals to and why — often never gets mentioned.

Describe the problem, not the artefact

Instead of "we need a new brochure", try: "procurement managers shortlist three vendors from a stack of submissions in about ten minutes, and we are not making the cut." That is a brief. It tells the designer what the work has to do, and it might even reveal that a brochure is the wrong deliverable.

Include these six things

1. The decision you want someone to make, and who is making it
2. What they currently think or do instead
3. Who you compete with, and what they look like
4. Any hard constraints — legal, technical, budgetary, political
5. What success looks like, stated as something observable
6. Who has final approval, and who does not

That last one matters more than it sounds

A surprising share of stalled projects are approval problems wearing a design costume. If the person who signs off has not been in the room, expect a late reversal — and that reversal will cost more than the entire discovery phase would have.

What to leave out

• Specific colours, unless there is a real constraint behind them
• References that are simply competitors you admire
• Solutions described as requirements ("we need a hexagon")
• Adjectives that every business in your category would also claim

If your brief would work equally well for your closest competitor, it is not yet a brief.

A test worth running

Read your brief and ask whether it could have been written by any company in your sector. If it could, keep going. The parts that only apply to you are the parts that will produce work only you could have.