You have found a studio whose work you like, you have had one call, and now they have asked you to send a brief. You have never worked with them, they have never worked with you, and neither of you knows yet how the other one thinks. The first brief is where that gets decided. Not the design. The relationship.
Most first briefs try to impress. They come with a deck, a history of the company, and a paragraph about values. Your designer reads all of it looking for three things, and usually finds none of them. Here are the three, and the line to write for each, so the first job goes well enough that there is a second.
Say what you know and what you do not
A new studio has no way to tell the difference between "we have decided this" and "we wrote this down to look decided". Tell them. A brief that separates the fixed from the open reads as honest, and honesty is the thing a designer is checking for in a first job, because it predicts how the revision rounds will go.
“Launch is in October. Budget is flexible. We are open to ideas on format.”
“Launch is 24 October and cannot move; it is the trade show. Budget is between 60 and 150k DKK, and we would rather hear what 60 buys than stretch to 150. Format is open: film, animation or both.”
Fixed, open, and honest about which is which.
Give them one person and one verb
The single most useful thing you can hand a studio you have never worked with is a picture of the person the work is for, and the one thing that person should do. It replaces a page of company history, and it tells the designer what to protect when two good options conflict, which happens every hour of a design job.
“We are a fast-growing Copenhagen coffee roaster with a passion for quality, targeting quality-conscious consumers and businesses.”
“This is for an office manager at a forty-person firm who has been told to sort out the coffee and has never bought from a roaster. She should book a tasting.”
One person, one verb. The company history can wait for the call.
Show them the last thing that went wrong
Every client has a story about a previous project that did not go well. Tell it, briefly and without blame, because it is the most useful piece of context a new studio can have. "Last time, the copy arrived three weeks late and the site launched with placeholder text" tells them where to build in slack. "Last time, four people had opinions and nobody decided" tells them to ask for a decision-maker before they start. You are not complaining. You are handing over a map of the ground.
“We have worked with agencies before with mixed results.”
“Last time, the copy arrived three weeks late and the launch slipped. This time Anna is writing it and drafts are due 1 October. Tell us if that still looks tight.”
A specific past problem, and what you have already done about it.
Name the decision-maker before they ask
A studio that has not worked with you does not know who in your company says yes. They will find out in the first review, when three people reply to the email with three different views. Say it in the brief: who signs off, who comments, and who decides when two people disagree. This single line is worth more to the schedule than any deadline.
“The team will review the first draft and share feedback.”
“Mette signs off. Jonas and I will comment, but Mette decides, and she will reply within two working days of each presentation.”
Who decides, and how fast. The studio can plan around that.
Ask them what they need from you
End the brief with a question. Not "let us know if you have questions", which is a closing line, but a real one: "What do you need from us before you can quote?" A good studio will answer with a short list, and that list is the second half of your brief. Asking it first signals that you expect this to be a conversation rather than a handover, which is how the good ones work.
“Let us know if you have any questions.”
“What do you need from us before you can quote? If it helps, we can do a thirty-minute call on Thursday with Mette in the room.”
A real question, and a way to answer it quickly.
When you do not know
You may not know the budget band, or the person the work is for, or who will decide. A first brief is exactly the place to say so, because a new studio would rather scope with you than guess against you. "We do not know the budget yet; tell us what 60k and 150k would each buy" is a brief for a proposal, and a studio can price a proposal. What sours a first job is not the open question. It is the confident answer that turns out to have been a guess.
When you brief through HereBriefly, the first brief to a new studio takes about ninety seconds, says which answers are open, and arrives as a document they can quote from. The conversation starts from the same page, which is the whole point of a first brief.
