What your designer wishes you already knew.
Short guides for the people who brief design work, and for the studios who receive it. Each one ends with a list you can paste into your next brief. Written by Nicolai Højfeldt, from both sides of the table.
Why “make it pop” costs you money
You have written the brief and it reads well, but the adjectives are doing the work. Here is how to turn each one into a decision your designer can act on.
Read
You are not sure whether to send two lines or two pages. The answer is five things, stated plainly, and a short list of what to leave to the designer.
A brief with gaps is not incomplete. It is complete with someone else’s answers. Here is what gets filled in by default, and the line that overrides each one.
You have a product, a shelf date and no idea what flexo is. You need four things, and the specification follows from them.
You asked for “a short film for social” and the quote came back for one file. Here is the arithmetic of placements, ratios and languages, done before the quote instead of after.
You have had one call with a studio you like, and they have asked for a brief. Here are the three things a new studio is reading for, and the line to write for each.
The brief is written and now come the attachments, which is where good briefs quietly fall apart. What to send, and the one line to say about each thing.
The first draft is here and you have a reaction. Here is how to turn it into feedback that makes round two the last round, and keeps your designer on your side.
Receiving briefs, running intake, and quoting from a document instead of a phone call.
You have a link. Here is where it goes, what to say when you send it, and what to do in the first ten minutes after a brief arrives, so briefs come in instead of being chased.
It arrived as a paragraph in an email. Here is how to turn it into something you can quote from within the hour, without making the client feel caught out.
For once the brief says things. Here is how to read it into a number you will stand behind, in the order that makes the number right, in about twenty minutes.