What a brief is for
A brief is not a description of what you want made. It is a description of the problem, tight enough that a good solution is recognisable when it appears.
Briefs that specify the solution - "we need a brochure and two standees" - get exactly that, including when the problem needed something else.
Briefs that specify nothing get a first concept that is a guess, and then three rounds of narrowing that a better brief would have avoided.
The eight lines that matter
The problem. What is not happening that should be.
The audience. Not a demographic - a person in a situation. "A dealer with limited counter space and five competing brands."
What we want them to do. One action.
What they currently think. And what would have to change.
The single most convincing true thing you can say.
Constraints. Legal lines, regulated content, brand rules, things that cannot change.
The date. An actual date.
How we will judge it. Agreed before, not after.
What makes a brief unworkable
No date, or a date that is not real. Everything downstream is scheduled off it.
No decision-maker named. If four people can each request changes and none can approve, the work will cycle.
"Make it stand out" as the objective. Everything in a shop is trying to stand out.
Competitor work attached with no comment. Do you want that or hate it? Both happen.
Content that is not final. Nothing consumes a schedule like copy that keeps arriving.
A budget kept secret. It does not improve the proposal, it just guarantees the first one is aimed at the wrong number.
Things worth attaching
A physical sample of the last version, if there is one. For print especially it answers more questions than any specification.
The brand guidelines, if they exist, and honesty about whether anybody follows them.
The legal or regulated wording, exactly as approved.
Photographs of the real environment: the shop, the shelf, the site, the counter. Almost nobody sends these and they change design decisions more than anything else in the brief.
A good brief is short
Two pages is plenty. Twelve pages usually means the problem has not been decided yet.
If you cannot write the problem in one sentence, that is worth discovering before a creative team spends two weeks on it.
We are happy to write the brief with you. Twenty minutes on a call usually produces something better than either side would have written alone.
