The brief we wish every client sent

We read around sixty briefs a year and say yes to roughly one in six. The ones that become good projects are rarely the longest. The best one we received last year was a single page from a hotel owner, written in an evening, and it told us more than the forty-slide decks that arrive with mood boards attached. Over time we have stopped asking for briefs in a format and started sending the same six questions instead. Anyone can answer them in an hour. Most companies find that answering them honestly takes a week, which is rather the point.

• What is changing in the business, and why now rather than last year?
• Who is it for, in one sentence, and who is it deliberately not for?
• What must stay? The name, the colour, the shop sign customers give directions by.
• Who decides? One person who signs off, and anyone else who can stop the project.
• What will be different in a year, as a number someone in the company already measures?
• What happens if you do nothing?

Then two figures: the budget and the date. Not a range chosen to see what we say, but what has actually been approved, and the day that cannot move. A brief without them is a conversation we will have anyway, only later and with more awkwardness on both sides.

Why no mood boards

Mood boards in a brief do two unhelpful things. They answer the design question before anyone has asked the strategic one, and they quietly set the bar at work someone else has already made for a different company. We would much rather see the things you have now, including the ones you are embarrassed by. A receipt template built in a hurry tells us more than a board of other people’s packaging.

The question most companies skip

Nearly every brief answers the first five, at least in part. Very few answer the sixth. What happens if you do nothing is the question that sets the size of the project, and it is uncomfortable because the honest answer is sometimes “not much”. When Casa Mareta wrote to us, Inês Valadares answered it in two lines: the houses would keep paying up to 18 per cent commission on nearly four rooms in five, and guests who loved one house would keep never finding the other two. That gave us a measure, a logic for the budget and a reason the work had to start in autumn rather than spring. Everything else in the project followed from those two lines.

Most briefs describe the work. The good ones describe the decision the work has to help someone make.

When the answer is “not much”, that is useful too. It usually means the project should be smaller: an audit, a fix to the checkout, a tidy-up of the files, rather than a new identity. We would rather scope that honestly than sell a rebrand nobody needed.

What we do with it

The six answers become the first page of our decision log. By the end of discovery they are rewritten, with the client, into the one-page brief we both sign, and every later decision is checked against it. If a route on the wall in week seven does not serve the answer to question five, it does not go forward, however much we like it. You do not need our six questions to write a good brief. But if you send us one, the most useful thing in it will be the sentence you found hardest to write. Leave it in, even if it is unflattering. It is usually the brief.