Design brief template

Problem, constraints and judgement: the three things a design brief must do, and why the constraints are the direction.

Pick a brief to startAbout 90 seconds. No account.

A design brief is not a description of the design. It is a description of the problem the design has to solve, the constraints it has to solve it within, and the way its success will be judged. When a brief does those three things, the designer can start. When it does not, the designer starts anyway, and the first round of work is really the brief being written by other means.

Problem, not solution

The most common failure is a brief that specifies the answer: a blue site with a big hero image and three columns. That is not a brief, it is an instruction, and a good designer will either follow it and produce something mediocre, or ignore it and produce something the client did not ask for. State what the work has to achieve and for whom, and leave the shape of it to the person you are paying to decide the shape.

Constraints are where the information is

A designer can work with almost any constraint as long as it is stated. Brand colours defined in Pantone. A logo that exists only as vector. A legal line that must appear at a minimum size. A page count that must be divisible by four. A press date six weeks before the launch. These are the facts that decide what is possible, and they are the facts briefers most often leave out, because they feel like details rather than direction. They are the direction.

What exists, and what does not

Every unticked item on the list of existing assets is a line in the estimate. Photography that has to be shot, copy that has to be written, a typeface that has to be licensed, a dieline that has to be created. A brief that says what exists tells the designer what they are being asked to make; a brief that leaves it out produces the phrase "we assumed you had that" three weeks in.

Scope in numbers

How many. Templates, pages, artwork files, cuts, language versions. A design brief that says "a brochure" and means a 48-page catalogue has not said anything. Counts are where quotes go wrong, and they are the easiest thing to state precisely.

Taste, shown rather than told

Adjectives fail because they are relative. Bold to one person is restrained to another. Five references you like and two you would avoid, each with a reason, communicate taste without the vocabulary problem, and they surface the contradictions early, when the brief can still say which way to lean.

Judgement

How will the work be judged, and by whom? The number of people who must approve, and what happens when they disagree, is the single strongest predictor of how many revision rounds a project takes. A brief that names one decision-maker has done more to protect the schedule than any date could.

Which brief to use

A design brief is a category, not a document. The questions that matter for a website are not the questions that matter for a pack or a film. This site has one brief for each, and the three are listed below. Each derives the specifications the designer would otherwise have to ask for, and each ends with the one thing that must not be got wrong, in a box, at the top of page one.

The questions in the print and packaging brief, and what goes wrong without them

  1. Scope
    What are you making?
    Packaging, editorial and signage share almost nothing. Naming which removes most of the tree.
  2. Scope
    What kind of packaging?only when it applies
    The container decides whether a dieline is needed, whether the artwork wraps, and whether a structural supplier must be involved before design starts. A missing dieline is the most common packaging delay there is.
  3. Scope
    Format and extentonly when it applies
    Page count decides the binding, and a count not divisible by four is a hard print constraint briefers routinely break.
  4. Craft
    How many are being made?
    Quantity decides the print method, and the print method decides whether spot colours and finishes make economic sense. The briefer almost never knows this and the printer always assumes it.
  5. Craft
    Finishes and colour
    Each finish is a separate vector file and an extra proof. Foil and emboss carry tooling costs that make short runs disproportionately expensive.
  6. Craft
    Regulatory content, and who prints itonly when it applies
    Missing regulatory content is the second most common cause of packaging reprints, after dielines. A named printer turns bleed, type sizes and colour profile from assumptions into facts.
  7. Craft
    Who is printing it?only when it applies
    A named printer turns bleed, minimum type size and colour profile from assumptions into facts.
  8. Look
    Pick what you like
    People are unreliable at describing taste and reliable at recognising it. Five picks say more than a paragraph of adjectives.
  9. Look
    Your picks pull two ways. Which is closer?only when it applies
    When the references contradict each other, the designer has to pick a side. Better that you do.
  10. Look
    What already exists?
    Raster logos cannot be printed at packaging quality, and this is discovered painfully late almost every time.
  11. Look
    Who is this for, and where will they see it?
    Where it is seen changes the design more than who buys it. Online product photography is almost never mentioned and changes everything.
  12. Practicalities
    Budget range
    A band is a signal about which kind of job is on the table, not a commitment. Without one the designer guesses.
  13. Practicalities
    Key date
    A date only means something next to the minimum production window. If they do not fit, better to know now.
  14. Practicalities
    Who signs it off?
    The number of approvers, with a named tiebreak, predicts revision rounds better than anything else in the brief.
  15. Practicalities
    The one thing that must not be got wrong
    Every project has one. It is rarely written down because it feels obvious to the person who knows it.
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