How to Brief a Designer: What to Prepare Before Your Redesign

A brief isn't a contract. It's the document that decides whether the work will be good before the work begins.

Most clients write briefs the way they'd write a job spec — a list of deliverables, a budget, a deadline. That information matters, but it isn't a brief. It's a purchase order. The brief is the bit that lives upstream of the deliverables and tells the studio what the project actually needs to do for the business.

Done well, it earns you better work. Done badly, it forces the studio to fill in the blanks themselves — and those blanks rarely close in the direction you'd have chosen.

Here's what's worth preparing before you brief a designer in the UK.

1. The business as it is now

Most briefs describe the business as it used to be — which is fair, because that's the version the founder is most fluent in. But a brand redesign has to be for the business as it stands today. Not the version on the about page. The current one.

Three useful sentences before you start:

• What we sell now, in one line

• Who's buying it now, in one line

• What's changed in the last two years

These are the sentences the studio will be designing against, whether you write them down or not. Better to write them down.

2. The audience you're actually trying to reach

"Anyone interested in our service" is not an audience. It's a list of everyone alive.

A useful answer is more uncomfortable than that. It names a specific kind of buyer — the one whose enquiry would make your week, who's worth your best work, who you'd cross London for. The more specific you can be, the more focused the brand can be. Studios who try to design for "everyone" tend to produce work that connects with no one.

3. The brands you respect, and the ones you don't

Mood boards help, but the more valuable artefact is articulate taste. The brief is much stronger when you can name three brands you respect — and three you don't — and explain why in a sentence each.

The "why" matters more than the brand. "I like this site because the typography is restrained" is a brief. "I like this site because it looks expensive" isn't.

4. What's not working, and what you suspect the reason is

A redesign is a correction, so the brief has to name what's being corrected. The leads have softened. The price gets pushed back on. The brand still looks like the version of the business that launched in 2018. Nobody believes the about page.

Be honest about the symptoms. Then take a guess at the cause, even if you're not sure. The studio's job is partly to test that guess — but they can't test what hasn't been said.

5. The practical constraints

Three numbers and one chain of approval are usually enough:

• The budget range you're working with

• The timeline you'd like to land in

• The launch date that actually matters, if there is one

• Who needs to approve the work, and at which stages

The approval question is the one most briefs miss, and it's the one that quietly derails projects. A brief signed off by a founder and then redirected mid-project by a co-founder, an investor, or a partner agency turns into a different brief entirely.

6. What success looks like

A redesign is hard to evaluate without a definition of success agreed before the work starts. Six months from launch — what does winning look like? Better-quality enquiries? A higher conversion rate on the site? The ability to charge more without resistance? A team that finally feels confident sending the link?

These are different objectives, and they push the design in different directions. A brand designed to attract better enquiries doesn't look the same as one designed to justify higher prices. Name yours.

What a good brief sounds like

A useful test: read your brief out loud. If it sounds like a job spec, it isn't ready. If it sounds like a founder explaining what's changed about the business, what they're trying to build next, and where the current brand is getting in the way — it's ready.

Studios design from confidence, and confidence comes from a brief that knows what it wants.

If you're preparing a brief for a UK redesign and would like a second pair of eyes on it, we'd be glad to take a look.