What makes a good creative brief?

Some clients know exactly what they want to see. Precise, specific and confident about the layout before we’ve even started.

Others give me the complete opposite, sharing pages of background, context, history, a wide, open direction and total trust to run with it. Which sounds freeing, but without a clear direction it's easy to head somewhere they didn't really want to go, or somewhere that wouldn’t work quite so strongly for their business objectives.

Lots of clients feel that they should give the designer free-reign to come up with whatever they want, but without any specific objectives it can just become wallpaper if a messaging or timing opportunity is missed.

Creativity is also very subjective and different people interpret things differently, therefore a layout or style has the potential to go in many different directions.

So while it’s super important to have all the background info, it’s helpful to know roughly what you’re aiming for.

There was a saying we had in an old agency ‘A piece of creative is only as good as the brief’. Quite often we’d find the project managers would give us briefs with so much information but no single objective. So we wouldn’t know which message was the most important.

With the precise brief, it's about asking enough questions to understand the reasoning, and not just follow the instruction. Hence the final layout can potentially feel visually off balance, so I need to know what the overall objective is to determine which elements to prioritise.

With the open brief, it's narrowing a wider viewpoint down into something specific enough to be able to apply a design style.

Neither style of brief is wrong, it’s my job to find the middle of both.

A good brief isn't really about how much detail is in it. It’s about asking the right questions to narrow it down. It's also about how well the client knows their own viewpoint and where they are headed, and how they communicate that to their designer.