Journal · Working together
How to brief a design studio
This will help you get better work out of anyone you hire, including us. Most of it turns out to be about feedback, not about the brief.
Projects rarely fail because the designer wasn't good enough. They fail because five people gave contradictory feedback, or because the real decision-maker appeared in week six with an opinion nobody had heard before.
These are the things that actually change the quality of what you get back.
Say what the business problem is, not what you want made
"We need a new logo" is a solution, and it may be the wrong one. "Customers assume we are more expensive than we are" is a problem. It might be solved by a logo, or by photography, or by changing your menu layout.
Bring the problem. Let the studio argue for the solution. If they can't, that's useful information about the studio.
Nominate one person to give feedback
This is the single highest-leverage decision in the whole project, and it costs nothing.
Consolidated feedback from one person produces coherent work. Feedback from four people produces an average, and the average of four opinions is never anyone's favourite. It's how you end up with a brand nobody dislikes and nobody remembers.
Gather as many opinions as you like. Send one.
Get the actual decision-maker in the first meeting
If your business partner, your father or your investor has veto power, they need to be in the room at the start, rather than shown near final work in week six.
A late veto doesn't cost a revision. It costs the project, because the objection is almost always to a strategic decision made in week one that everything since has been built on.
Say what you can't change
Constraints improve work. Tell the studio everything that is fixed:
- Print budget and which supplier you're locked into
- Existing signage you can't afford to replace
- A colour a competitor owns in your market
- Regulatory requirements such as food labelling, medical or halal certification
- The name, if it genuinely can't change
A studio that learns about the $1,000 print budget after designing a five-colour foil-stamped system has wasted your money, and it wasn't entirely their fault.
Describe taste in nouns, not adjectives
"Modern", "clean", "premium" and "elegant" mean nothing. Every client says them and every one means something different.
Instead:
- Send five brands you admire, and say why for each
- Send three you dislike, and say why, this is more useful than the first list
- Name a competitor you'd hate to be mistaken for
Don't ask for options you don't intend to choose from
Asking for six routes doesn't get you six good ones. It gets you one the studio believes in and five they don't, and you can usually tell which is which, which means you've paid for five pieces of theatre.
Two well-argued directions is the right number. If the studio can't argue for both, ask for one.
Respond quickly, or accept the deadline moves
Studios schedule around your response times. A week of silence doesn't pause the project neatly, the team moves to other work and you rejoin the queue.
Three working days is a fair target for feedback. If you can't manage that in a particular week, say so in advance and everyone re-plans calmly.
A brief that works, in six lines
You genuinely don't need more than this to start a conversation:
- What the business does, in one sentence
- Who buys from you, and what they nearly bought instead
- The business problem you're trying to solve
- What's fixed and can't change
- Budget range and deadline
- Who gives final approval
If you can answer those six, any competent studio can quote you accurately and start well. If you can't answer the third one, that's the thing to work on before you hire anybody.