How to Write a Design Brief That Gets Great Work

When a design project goes wrong, founders blame the designer. Half the time the real culprit is the brief. A vague brief produces vague work, endless revisions, and a designer quietly guessing what you want. A good brief takes an hour to write and saves weeks. Here is what goes in it.

Start with context and the goal, not the deliverable

Do not open with \"we need a landing page.\" Open with why. \"We sell payroll software to restaurants. Trials are fine but only 8 percent convert to paid. We think the pricing page confuses people. Success means more trial signups reaching the checkout step.\" Now the designer is solving a problem instead of decorating a page, and can push back with better ideas than the one you started with.

Describe the audience specifically

\"Everyone\" is not an audience. Write two or three sentences about who actually uses this: their job, their situation, what they already know, what device they are on. \"Restaurant owners in their 40s and 50s, checking on a phone between shifts, suspicious of software subscriptions\" changes every design decision that follows. If you have real user quotes or support tickets, paste two or three in. They are gold.

Define scope and deliverables precisely

List exactly what you expect to receive: number of pages or screens, formats, source files, responsive versions, how many revision rounds. Ambiguity here is where budgets die. \"Website design\" could mean five screens or fifty. Also state what is explicitly out of scope, like copywriting or development, so nobody discovers a gap at handoff.

Give references, and always say why

Three to five examples of work you like beats a thousand words of description. But the reference alone is not the value. The why is. \"I like Linear's site because it feels calm and technical\" tells the designer what quality to reproduce. Without the why, they may copy the one thing you did not care about. Include one or two examples of what you dislike too, with reasons. Negative references remove more guesswork than positive ones.

State constraints, timeline and budget honestly

Constraints help designers, they do not limit them. Existing brand colors, technical platform, accessibility requirements, legal text that must appear: list them all upfront. Then be straight about timeline and budget. Hiding your budget does not get you a better price, it gets you proposals scoped for the wrong project. If you have $2,000 and three weeks, say so. Good designers will tell you what is achievable within that, which is exactly the conversation you want before work starts.

What to leave out

The most common brief mistake is prescribing the solution. Skip the layout instructions, the \"make the logo bigger\" energy, and the font choices unless they are brand mandates. You hired a designer for design judgment; a brief that dictates every decision buys you a pair of hands instead of a brain. Also cut company history beyond a paragraph, buzzword vision statements, and anything you would not act on if the designer asked about it.

The one page template

Keep the whole brief to one page using this outline:

• Context and goal: what the business does, the problem, what success looks like.
• Audience: who this is for, in two or three specific sentences.
• Deliverables and scope: exact outputs, formats, revision rounds, what is out of scope.
• References: three to five examples with a reason for each.
• Constraints: brand, technical, legal, accessibility.
• Timeline and budget: real dates and real numbers.
• Decision maker: who gives feedback and who signs off.

A brief is not instructions for the designer. It is the problem, described so well that a good designer cannot miss.

Put your brief to work on DevDey

Once your brief is ready, DevDey makes the next step easy: post it as a free job and get proposals from vetted designers with verified reviews, or browse designer profiles and send it directly. The same principles apply when hiring engineers, and we cover that in How to Write a Job Post That Attracts Developers.