How to Create the Perfect Brief

The design brief is your roadmap to describe the view, objectives, and strategy of a specific creative project, maximizing the chance of an end result that you will love. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a creative agency, or part of a big corporation, a good design brief is a blueprint to the project's success. 

Here's a guide meant to help you structure all the necessary information in an efficient and hassle-free manner.

1. Describe your business and industry

The information gathered here should provide the insights your designer needs for a complete understanding of your business and a brief overview of the industry you operate in.
A link to your website or a sales pitch are, without a doubt, useful information, though the description section of the brief must also answer questions like the following:

• What is your business about? What are the core values, purpose, and strategy?
• What is your target market? Who are your customers and what do they think about your brand?
• Who are your competitors? How are you different, or want to be perceived as different, from them? 

2. Define the scope of the design project

This section of the creative brief must contain all the necessary information to answer the most important question of all. What is the project about?
Whether is a recurrent social media graphic, a landing page, or a complex brand design project, the scope of it must be correctly defined.
Below are a few questions that might help: 

• What feelings and associations do you want to evoke?
• What's the exact copy you want to include? – Are there any titles, sub-titles, paragraphs, etc. needed or some general brand message/tagline?
• What are the functional and emotional benefits your project will deliver to customers? What problem does it solve? 
• Where will consumers be able to “see” your project? (digital, print, corporate, etc.
• What should be the dimension and format of the deliverables you are looking for?

3. Provide inspiration 

What are your aesthetic preferences or reference materials you are inspired by?
Your brief must contain details regarding preferred colors, images, and typography, as well as visual examples: 

• Upload images of similar graphics that you like or assets you already have and want to use
• Provide links to similar concepts that you like, on platforms such as Dribbble, Behance, Pinterest, ManyPixels Portfolio, etc. or any other inspirational source you might find convenient. 

Once the creative brief is complete, it’s time to add the project to your queue in the app and your assigned designer will start working on it, providing you with daily updates.
If you need to meet a certain deadline (for a long-term project, for example) please confirm the date in your brief, so that we can have the time to make changes to deliverables before they are needed.

💡Tips & Tricks 

1. Be clear and concise - keep your briefs efficiently structured, with concise sentences. Bullet points work great!
2. Tell us the WHY - it is less about throwing tens of inspiration links at your designer than it is about what motivates your choices. 
3. Use tools - there is plenty of helpful software out there, meant to make your business life easier. Loom, for example, helps you record videos of your screen where you can pinpoint what you want and like, or Balsamiq, that can help you create wireframes for your web design requests. 
4. Set your expectations - do you need a quick brush-up or a complete, well-thought design that can take more time? The more we know about this, the more we can adapt to your needs.