How to Write a Design Brief | Writing Examples

A brief doesn’t need to follow a formal structure. It can be a well-crafted essay or a bulleted list. But it should contain the answers to most of these questions: What is the challenge? Why are you embarking on the project now? a little history, from your perspective, can be very helpful. What are the objectives? What is the current situation? Who

Designers work from what’s called a brief—a challenge presented to them by a client or collaborator with a more or less straightforward goal. It’s a description of what’s required at the end of the collaboration: a building, a playground, or a product, for example.

What the brief should not do is suggest solutions. That’s our job. This is important to remember, because a proposed direction or solution from a client is often difficult to forget and may serve to limit a creative team’s thinking.

At the same time, the brief can’t be too limiting—there still has to be enough space to allow for surprising solutions. When I was doing my master’s in communications design at Pratt, a professor once said to me that if the brief is “design a better toothbrush,” you will always end up with something that looks like a toothbrush. But if you open up