How to Build a Brand Brief Before You Hire a Designer
Illustration of a Brand Brief
The document that makes every design project faster, cheaper, and better
I've worked with founders who came to me with a six-page brand brief, a competitive analysis, and a crystal-clear articulation of their target customer. Those projects flew. We spent the time on creative decisions, not on excavating basic information.
I've also worked with founders who came in with a vague idea and a lot of enthusiasm. Those projects took twice as long, cost more, and involved at least one complete direction change partway through.
The difference almost always came down to one thing: whether the founder had done the thinking before the design work started. A brand brief is how you capture that thinking. Here's how to build one.
What a brand brief actually is
A brand brief is a document — could be one page, could be five — that captures the strategic foundation of your brand before anyone designs anything. It's not a creative direction document. It's not a mood board. It's the answers to the questions that every design decision should be answering.
Think of it as the instruction manual for your brand. Without it, every designer you hire is guessing. With it, they're solving a defined problem — which is a completely different and much better conversation.
The 8 things your brand brief needs
One: Your business in one sentence. What you do, who you do it for, what outcome you deliver. Not the full pitch — just the clearest, most specific version of the thing.
example: “I’m Eloisa, and I design brands for small businesses”Two: Your target customer. Not demographics — a real person. What do they worry about? What have they already tried? What would make them feel like they found exactly the right solution?
example: “My target customer is Elizabeth, a small business owner who has offered accounting services for a few years but has never gone digital, and needs help building up her brand”Three: Your top three competitors. Who else is solving this problem, and how are they positioning themselves? Where are the gaps?
example: “My competitors right now are two local designers who offer similar services, but lack accessibility in their designs and services, and have different styles”Four: Your differentiator. The real one, not the generic one. Not "great customer service" — the actual thing that makes you the obvious choice for the right customer.
example: “I have close to 10 years of digital accessibility and product design experience, allowing me to help my clients polish their offerings, in addition to over 15 of creative services experience vs companies that have been in business less than 5 years”Five: Three to five brand values. The principles that guide your decisions. These should be specific enough that they actually rule things out. "Quality" is not a value. "We never ship something we wouldn't show our best client" is a value.
example: “I never miss deadlines of budgets" + “I don’t ship or design anything without having the data to back up design decisions”Six: Your brand personality. If your brand were a person, who would it be? Pick three adjectives and a reference point. "Think Patagonia meets IDEO" tells a designer more than a paragraph of description.
example: “Think Apple meets Disney” (sophistication meets playfulness)Seven: Your tone of voice. How does your brand speak? Give examples of what it sounds like and what it definitely doesn't. "Direct and a bit witty — not corporate, not overly casual" is a useful brief. "Professional" is not.
example: “Casual but trustworthy”Eight: What success looks like. What do you want people to feel when they land on your site? What should they do? What should they remember? Define the outcome before the work starts.
example: “When people land on my website, they immediately see that there’s a creative aspect to it, but also a professionalism that wants them to stay”How long should it be?
As long as it needs to be and no longer. I've seen great brand briefs that fit on one page and terrible ones that ran to twenty. The goal is clarity, not comprehensiveness.
If you can answer all eight sections above in a single page with specific, honest answers, that's a great brief. If you need more space to be specific, use it. If you're padding to look thorough, cut it.
A brief that's too vague is useless. A brief that's too long gets ignored. Aim for the version that a designer could read in ten minutes and walk away knowing exactly what they're solving for.
A note on using this before you hire anyone
The process of writing a brand brief is valuable even if you never show it to a designer. It forces you to make decisions you might otherwise leave fuzzy. Who exactly is this for? What exactly makes us different? What exactly do we want people to feel?
Fuzzy answers at the brief stage become expensive problems at the design stage. Do the thinking first. It's the cheapest part of the whole process.
