The fear behind most late briefs is that the designer needs a document. A proper one, with sections, written by someone who knows the words. So the brief waits until there is time to do it properly, which is never, and what arrives instead is an email with three sentences and a link to a competitor. If that is you, you are in good company, and the fix is smaller than you think.
A designer needs surprisingly little from you, and it is not the part people spend their time on. Five things, stated plainly, and a short list of what to leave to them. Here they are, with the line to write for each.
State the deliverable in physical terms
Not "a video" but "a 30-second film for Reels and YouTube, in Danish and English". Not "a website" but "a five-template site with around ninety pages and a journal". Not "packaging" but "a folding carton in three variants, five thousand units". The physical statement is what a designer prices from, and it is what most briefs replace with a paragraph of context that prices nothing. If you can write only one line, write this one.
“We need a video for the autumn launch.”
“One 30-second hero film for Instagram Reels and YouTube pre-roll, plus a 4:5 cut for the Meta feed, in Danish with English subtitles.”
Name one person it is for
One. Not a segment, not a persona deck, not "consumers and B2B". A facilities manager at a mid-size firm who has never bought this before. A gift buyer in a speciality food shop. Your designer cannot make work for four audiences at once, and a brief that lists four has really said "we have not decided". One or two sentences is plenty, and the short length keeps the marketing language out.
If you serve several audiences, pick the one this piece of work is for. The others will still see it. The question is who it has to work for first.
“Target audience: SMEs, enterprise decision makers, and consumers aged 25 to 55.”
“For an office manager at a 40-person firm who has been told to sort out the coffee and has never bought from a roaster before.”
Choose one verb
What should that person do? Buy, book, get in touch, sign up, understand, trust. This is the question people dodge most reliably, usually with "raise awareness", which is not something a person does. The verb is how the work will be judged. Without it, the review is a matter of taste, and taste is where revision rounds live.
One verb also settles a hundred small decisions your designer would otherwise have to ask about. If the verb is "book", the button is the hero. If the verb is "understand", the explanation is.
“The goal is to raise awareness of the new range and strengthen the brand.”
“They should tap through to the product page and add a bag to the basket.”
List what exists
Logo files, brand guidelines, typefaces, photography, copy, footage, a dieline, a script. The list of what you have is really a list of what your designer has to make, and every gap in it is a line in the estimate. This takes thirty seconds and prevents the sentence "we assumed you had that" three weeks in.
Be honest about the state of things. A logo that exists only as a JPEG on the website does not exist for print. Photography from 2019 that nobody likes any more is not photography you have.
“We have all the brand assets.”
“We have vector logo files and a guidelines PDF. No photography we want to use. Copy is not written; Anna will draft it by 1 October.”
Give the constraint that cannot move
Every project has one thing that must not be got wrong. The product must never be shown on a desk. The barcode must scan. The booking must work on a phone with one thumb. It is rarely written down because it is obvious to the person who knows it, and it is the first thing your designer should read. Put it at the top, in a box, before the context.
If there are three things that cannot move, pick the one that would cost the most if it went wrong. The other two go in the brief too, but one of them is the constraint.
“Please make sure everything is on brand and approved by legal.”
“The one thing that must not be got wrong: the product name is Vela, pronounced VEE-la, and it must be said aloud once in every cut.”
What you can leave to the designer
Everything the platform decides. Aspect ratios, pixel sizes, codecs, bleed, colour profiles, breakpoints, minimum type sizes, safe areas, the print method for your quantity. These are facts, not opinions, and a good designer knows them better than you do. The part of the brief that felt hard to write was never the part that needed you.
You can also leave them the layout, the typeface, the colour of the button and the order of the sections. That is the job. A brief that specifies these has hired a pair of hands rather than a designer, and it will get a pair of hands.
When you do not know
You may not know the deliverable count, or the verb, or whether the copy will exist in time. Write that down as it is: "Not sure whether this is one film or three. Please advise." That sentence is worth more to your designer than a confident wrong answer, because it tells them the first conversation is a scoping call, and they can price it as one. What costs money is the unknown presented as known.
When you brief with HereBriefly, these five things are the three typed fields and two taps. Everything the platform decides is written for you, and anything you leave open is marked in the document as an open question rather than filled in with a guess.
Nicolai Højfeldt founded HereBriefly and writes these guides. Everything in them comes from briefs that went wrong on one side of the table or the other, and from the ones that went right.
