What to Send a Designer Before a Project Starts

The quality of a first design round is set before any design happens. It is set by the brief.

Most briefs are one paragraph and a deadline, which means the designer spends round one guessing and round two correcting the guesses. Twenty minutes spent writing properly usually saves a week.

Here is the whole list.

The essentials

What you are making. Specifically. Not “some branding” — “a logo, a colour system and a one-page usage guide”, or “seven Amazon listing images for one ASIN”.

Who it is for. Not “everyone”. The narrower this is, the better the work. “Operations managers at mid-size logistics firms who are replacing a spreadsheet” is a brief. “B2B customers” is not.

What it needs to achieve. Ideally something checkable. “Increase the conversion rate on this listing” is measurable; “look more premium” is a direction. Both are legitimate, but say which one it is.

The deadline, and whether it is real. A fixed launch date, a trade show, a print slot — say so. Designers plan differently around hard dates, and “end of the month, roughly” produces a different schedule from “the boxes go to print on the 14th”.

The budget, or a range. Withholding it does not get you a better price; it gets you a proposal that may be aimed at the wrong scope entirely.

The things that save the most time

Your existing assets. Logo in vector, brand guidelines if they exist, fonts you are licensed for, product photography, previous work in the same family. Send more than you think is relevant.

Three examples of work you like — with reasons. The reasons matter more than the examples. “I like this because the type does the work and there is no clutter” is directive. A link on its own is a Rorschach test.

One or two examples you dislike, also with reasons. Frequently more useful than the likes, because it defines the boundary.

Your competitors. Especially the ones you are compared to. A brand that looks great and identical to the market leader has failed.

Any constraint that is non-negotiable. Legal requirements, a colour you cannot use, a format the printer demands, an accessibility standard, a parent brand’s rules. These shape the work from the first sketch; discovered late, they invalidate it.

Who signs off. One name. If three people can independently send feedback, you will receive contradictory instructions and pay for the confusion in revision rounds.

The e-commerce specifics

If it is marketplace work, also send:

• Your product photography, at full resolution
• The spec sheet
• Your last hundred reviews, and the customer questions. This is the single most useful thing you can provide for listing images and infographics — the objections are already written down by your actual buyers
• Your two closest competitors’ listings
• Which marketplaces and which locales

What you do not need to provide

A solution. “I want the logo in the top left, bigger, in blue” is you doing the job you are paying for. Describe the problem — “the brand does not register when I glance at it” — and let the solution be proposed.

Perfect copy. Placeholder is fine at brief stage, as long as it is roughly the right length. Say so, so nobody designs around a headline that will double in size.

A moodboard, unless you enjoy making one. Three references with reasons does the same job faster.

A template you can copy

Project: [what you are making] Deadline: [date, and whether it moves] Budget: [range]

Audience: [specific description] Goal: [what it should achieve, measurable if possible]

Assets attached: [list] Competitors: [two or three links] References I like: [links + one line each on why] References I don’t: [links + why]

Constraints: [legal, technical, brand, accessibility] Sign-off: [one name] Anything else we should know: [the thing you almost did not mention]

That last line is worth keeping. It is where the genuinely useful context usually turns up.

What to expect back

A good response to a good brief is not a design. It is a scope, a price and a start date — plus, ideally, at least one question that shows they read it.

If a studio comes back with a quote and no questions at all, either the brief was exceptional or nobody read it closely. Worth finding out which.

That is exactly how our first reply works — see our process, or send a brief and you will get a scope, a fixed price and a start date back within one business day.