How much detail a designer actually needs

The fear behind most bad briefs is that the designer needs a document. A proper one, with sections, written by someone who knows the words. So the brief gets postponed until there is time to write it properly, which is never, and what arrives instead is an email with three sentences and a link to a competitor's site. The truth is that a designer needs surprisingly little, and it is not the part people spend their time on.

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 blog". 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 only write one line, write this one.

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. A designer cannot make work for four audiences, and a brief that lists four has really said "we have not decided". One hundred and forty characters is plenty, and the limit stops the marketing language creeping in.

Choose one verb

What should the person do? Buy, book, get in touch, sign up, understand, trust. This is the question briefers 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.

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 the 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.

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 hand. It is rarely written down because it is obvious to the person who knows it, and it is the first thing the designer should read. Put it at the top.

What you can leave to the designer

Everything the platform decides. Aspect ratios, pixel sizes, codecs, bleed, colour profiles, breakpoints, minimum type sizes. These are facts, not opinions, and a good designer knows them better than you do. A tool like HereBriefly derives them from the five things above, which is the point: the part of the brief that felt hard to write was never the part that needed you.