How I Write a Design Brief (and the Questions Most Clients Skip
Every project I've worked on in fourteen years started one of two ways. Either the client had a brief, or they didn't. The ones without a brief always took longer, cost more, and ended with at least one round of 'wait, that's not what I meant'.
The brief is the most boring part of a design project. Nobody has ever been excited to fill one out. But I've learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, that the fifteen minutes a client spends answering my questions at the start will save us both weeks of misalignment later.
So here's what I actually ask, and why.
The questions
I send a short document before our kickoff call. It's not a form. It's a list of questions with space to write as much or as little as they want. Most clients finish it in fifteen minutes. Some take an hour and send me three pages. Both are useful.
I could wait for clients to send me their own brief. Some do. But most of the time, a client-written brief either includes too much (a ten-page brand manifesto) or too little ('we need a logo, here's our website'). I'd rather ask the right questions myself and get the answers I actually need.
What does your company do, in one sentence?
This sounds condescending. It's not. I've had clients send me four paragraphs that somehow never explain what they sell. If you can't describe it in one sentence, your audience won't be able to either, and that's a problem I need to know about before I start designing.
Good answer: 'We make project management software for construction teams.' Vague answer: 'We empower teams to streamline their workflows through innovative solutions.'
That second one tells me nothing. But it tells me something about how the client thinks about their own business, which is useful in a different way.
Who is this for?
Not demographics. I don't care if your audience is '25 to 45, urban, tech-savvy'. That describes half of Lisbon. I want to know who actually buys from you. What do they do for a living? What problem brought them to you? What did they try before you?
The best answer I ever got was from a client who said, 'My customers are restaurant owners who are too busy to think about design but embarrassed by their current menu.' That's a person. I can design for a person.
Who are your competitors, and what do you think of their design?
This question does two things. First, it shows me the visual territory the client already lives in. Second, and this is the part most briefs miss, it tells me what they want to avoid. A client who says 'our competitors all look the same and we hate it' is giving me a very different assignment from one who says 'we want to look like these three companies but better'.
Both are valid. I just need to know which one before I start sketching.
What three words describe how your brand should feel?
I know. Three words. It sounds like something from a branding workshop run by someone who charges too much. But it works. The constraint forces clients to choose, and the choices are always revealing.
A client who says 'bold, playful, approachable' gets a very different project from one who says 'quiet, precise, premium'. Those words won't appear in the final design. They're a compass, not a map. But without a compass, you end up designing in circles, which I've done, and it's not fun.
Do you have existing brand materials? Can I see them?
Old logos, business cards, colour palettes, a website that hasn't been updated since 2019. All of it. I want to see what came before, even if the client hates it.
Sometimes I find things worth keeping. A colour that works better than the client thinks. A typeface that just needs better spacing. More often, I learn what went wrong last time so I can avoid the same mistakes. The worst version of this is when a client says 'we have nothing' and then halfway through the project sends me a brand guidelines PDF from 2017 that contradicts half of what we've done.
What does success look like for this project?
This is the question clients skip most often, and it's the most important one. If I don't know what success looks like, I can't tell whether we've achieved it.
Some clients want more enquiries from their website. Some want to look credible enough to raise funding. Some just want to stop being embarrassed when they hand out their business card. These are all different projects, even if they start with the same deliverables.
When a client can't answer this question, I don't push. I just make a note that we'll need to figure it out together during the first review. That's fine. Not everyone knows what they want. But someone needs to ask.
What's your budget and timeline?
I put this last on purpose. By the time we get here, the client has already told me what they need, who it's for, and what success looks like. The budget and timeline question lands differently when there's context around it.
Most clients are honest about budget if you ask directly. The ones who aren't usually say 'it depends on what you propose', which means their budget is lower than they think mine will be. That's not a problem. It's information. I'd rather know now than after I've spent a week on a direction that's twice what they can afford.
The questions I don't ask
I don't ask about preferred colours, fonts, or layouts. Not because those things don't matter, but because clients aren't designers and shouldn't have to be. Asking someone to pick a colour before they've seen the work is like asking them to choose a font for their novel before they've written the first chapter.
If a client has strong opinions about aesthetics, those come out naturally in the competitor question and the three-words question. I'd rather discover their taste through conversation than through a dropdown menu.
I also don't ask for a list of 'must-haves' and 'nice-to-haves'. In my experience, everything starts as a must-have and stays that way until the budget runs out. Priorities reveal themselves during the project, not before it.
The balance between too open and too tight
There's a version of the brief that's just as bad as no brief at all: the one that tells the designer exactly what to do. Pick this colour. Use this font. Make the logo bigger.
Anthony Burrill put it well in a recent It's Nice That piece: when a brief is too prescriptive, there's not enough room for exploration. The designer ends up executing someone else's vision instead of solving the actual problem. That's not design. That's production.
But the opposite is just as difficult. Animator Ramin Nazer made a point in the same article that stuck with me: limitation is actually very helpful in creativity. A brief that says 'do whatever you want' sounds generous, but it gives you nothing to push against. The best work I've done came from clients who were specific about the problem and open about the solution.
That's what a good brief does. It draws a boundary around the problem without dictating what the answer looks like. 'Our customers are restaurant owners who are embarrassed by their current menu' is a constraint. 'Make it blue and modern' is a prison.
What the brief actually does
After the call, I paste the brief into page 01 of the Figma file. It sits there for the entire project, visible to anyone who opens the link. I wrote about how I structure my files in another post, and the brief page is probably the one I reference most often.
When a client says 'can we try making the logo bigger' in week three, I don't argue. I scroll back to the brief and read their own words back to them. 'You said the brand should feel quiet and precise. Let's look at whether a bigger logo supports that.' Sometimes it does. Sometimes the client realises they were reacting to something else entirely. Either way, the brief turned a subjective argument into a productive conversation.
That's the real purpose of a brief. It's not a contract. It's a reference point. A place to go back to when the project starts drifting, which every project does at some point.
If you're about to hire a designer
Write the brief before you start looking. You don't need a template. Just answer the questions above in your own words. Be honest about budget. Be specific about who your customers are. Say what success looks like, even if it's vague.
The designer who reads it will already understand your project better than most agencies would after a two-hour discovery session. And if they don't ask you any of these questions themselves, that probably tells you something too.
I build brand identities or websites, in days not months.
