Most briefs describe the wrong project in detail. The brief-less brief asks four questions instead: why now, what success means, what failed, who decides.
I have read hundreds of briefs. Most of them describe a project I have no business doing, sometimes a project that does not exist. The brief is treated as a sacred document, written once, sent out to three agencies, used to compare quotes line by line. The problem is that the brief is almost always written before anyone has done the thinking that would make the brief useful.
The brief is supposed to align a studio and a client. In practice it does the opposite. It locks in assumptions the client made on a Tuesday morning, presents them as constraints, and asks the studio to solve a problem that may not be the real one.
What a brief usually contains
Open any standard brief. You will find: a paragraph of company background, a list of deliverables, a timeline, a budget range that is rarely the real range, and a tone-of-voice sentence with the words modern and premium in it. Sometimes a competitor list. Sometimes a moodboard link that opens to a Pinterest board last edited in 2023.
What you will not find is why this is happening now, what would count as success in twelve months, what was tried before and why it failed, and who actually has to be convinced. Those four questions are the project. The rest is execution.
The real questions
When I take a discovery call, I ask four things before anything else.
- Why now? Not why ever, why this quarter. Companies do not commission redesigns at random. Something changed. A funding round closed. A competitor shipped. A board member made a comment. The trigger is the brief. Everything else is window dressing.
- What does success look like twelve months out? Not metrics, outcomes. We close enterprise deals we currently lose at the demo stage. We stop spending forty hours a month on landing-page tickets. If the founder cannot describe a future state in one sentence, the project is not ready.
- What did you try before? Every redesign is a re-design. There was a previous version. Someone made it. Something happened. The story of what failed is more useful than any positive vision, because it reveals what the team actually values when forced to choose.
- Who has to be convinced? Sometimes one person. Sometimes a board. Sometimes a customer cohort. The answer changes the work. A brand built to convince a board is a different brand than one built to convince a power user. Most briefs pretend everyone is the audience. Nobody is.
The brief is the output, not the input
The thing I have come to believe, and it is unpopular, is that the brief should be a deliverable of discovery, not a precondition for engagement. The first week of a real project is writing the brief together. The studio interviews the client. The client surfaces the contradictions in their own thinking. By the end of the week, there is a document both sides have signed that reflects what the project actually is.
That document looks nothing like the brief the client sent over.
If the brief survives discovery unchanged, discovery didn't happen. Discovery is the act of breaking the brief.
What this costs the client
Discovery as a separate phase has a price. Clients sometimes resist paying for it because the deliverable is just a document. The document is not the deliverable. The deliverable is the avoidance of three months of building the wrong thing. I have never had a client who paid for discovery and regretted it. I have had several who skipped it and rebuilt the project six months in.
What this costs the studio
Studios resist this too, because writing briefs is unbillable in the way clients usually buy work. Most studios solve this by quietly absorbing discovery into the first phase of design, which means they discover while designing, which means they design the wrong thing and revise it later. The revisions are billed. Everyone loses.
The honest answer is to bill discovery, do it properly, and let the client decide at the end whether to proceed. About nine times out of ten, they do, because the conversation has clarified for them what they actually need. That tenth time, the discovery was the project, and walking away is the right call for both sides.
The brief, after all this
When discovery is done well, the brief is short. Two pages. One paragraph on the trigger. One paragraph on the future state. A bulleted list of constraints. A named audience. A success definition that fits on a sticky note.
The hundred-page brief is a defense mechanism. It exists so that nobody can be blamed when the project fails. The two-page brief is an attack. It exists so that the project can succeed, and so that everyone knows what success looks like before anyone opens Figma.
That is the brief I want. We rarely get it from clients on day one. So we write it on day five, together, and the project starts when it is signed.
Frequently asked questions
What should a website or brand brief include?
The trigger for the project, a one-sentence definition of success in twelve months, what was tried before and why it failed, the audience that has to be convinced, and the real constraints.
Who should write the design brief?
Ideally the client and studio together, during discovery. A brief written alone before discovery usually locks in untested assumptions.
