Every project you or your organization designs needs a first approach document through which you explain the project's overall scope to the potential client. Design projects are not different. The ideal paper presenting your ideas about the project is a Design Brief – a document summarizing the main features of your project. This article discusses what it is, how it works, and why your company needs it. Moreover, we will provide some useful templates to facilitate its creation process.

A design brief is a relevant document that a design team uses to explain the core details of an upcoming design project. In other words, it's a roadmap, a project management document that provides general guidelines and scopes to take the project from scratch to a successful finish.

From a certain point of view, design briefs work as blueprints for constructions or machines, providing clients with crucial information to carry out the design-brief process. Design briefs also give them sharp limits, so the client's expectations will be within the agreed framework.

It contains all the relevant details about what you, as a designer, will do to fulfill the client's requirements. In summary, it's a draft that offers the crucial information briefly.

Source: Blog.uxtweak.

A design brief contains the relevant project details, and recorded ideas, options, and possibilities regarding the design project. It allows to create a closer relationship between your organization and potential clients.

As an initial document for a new project, a well-written design brief is crucial to note initial ideas from you and the client's target audience or stakeholders. It also provides you with logistics for the execution of essential elements.

A design project brief is the kickoff of the whole process before the client’s brand gives the project's final approval. In this sense, design agencies present this document to communicate their general idea. Of course, after being accepted, you and multiple stakeholders may change some aspects and modify some details, but the key elements remain.

Many design companies or studios commonly present a design brief to realize a project of a particular client. In general, clients ask interested studios to offer their projects. This way, stakeholders can evaluate proposals, their intentions, creativity, plan, budget, and other aspects of the project.

Then, your design organization must learn to work with design briefs to be awarded design work. Your organization should present several design-brief examples before submitting the final proposal. Each design-brief example will help your team determine the best style to present the proposal.

Every design process is complex; it involves considering multiple factors, including spatiality, building materials, textures, illumination design, and abstract concepts. All this added up can be too much for the client. A design brief summarizes all these aspects and explains them in simpler terms.

In this sense, a design brief is a perfect document to convince stakeholders that your company or you, as a professional designer, are the ideal choice to achieve the client's goals.

Great organizations, government agencies, and other institutions often release open content to carry out a design project. These can be about building a particular environment, designing a logo, creating a web design, publications, etcetera.

If your organization is interested in participating in these contents, you must write a design brief and attach it to the final document when presenting your proposal.

These types of contents are also crucial to make project goals clear and present all the steps to measure success and the exact budget to finish the project. In a few words, it should integrate all the project details perfectly.

Design briefs may differ from each other. Still, most of them you can find on the web share many similar aspects, which we mention below.

The project overview section provides a solid and concise description of the projects. Before writing the scope of the project, you should ask yourself:

What do your clients expect to receive at the end of the project?

It also may clarify why behind your proposal.

Other essential questions you may ask yourself to clarify the what and why of your project and further additional important details are the following:

• What do we need to design?

• What is the final product we need to deliver?

• What design problems do we have to solve?

Despite the client knowing what they want, they are usually still determining the main objective of the new design. Then, it's your mission and duty to tell the client your design's final goal and its repercussions.

In a well-detailed description of the project objectives, you must describe how you will measure them.

The more specific the project objectives, the better it will be to explain what you must do to go there. Before writing an effective design brief, you have to ask yourself the following questions to clarify goals:

• Does our company have to design a project from scratch or redesign a previous design?

• How should the desired outcomes of this project look?

Being clear about who the client is is crucial to understand what kind of expected deliverables they want to receive. It would help if you researched the brand guidelines, the key points of the clients, their products, etcetera. This way, you can clearly understand what the client needs.

You should also be clear about the target market of the client. In this sense, you should ask the following questions:

• What demographics do they sell their products for?

• What are the psychological traits of their public?

An essential part of understanding your client's purpose and profile is knowing everything about the direct competitors. Performing an analysis of the competition is a great starting point to know how your client wants to differentiate themselves from their competition.

Some questions you can ask your client for better design decisions in this regard are the following:

• What are the main competitors of the client?

• How do you want to differentiate your company from competitors?

• Are there some points in which you want to be like your competitors?

Great design brief clearly shows the project's expected budget and schedule. Remember, you will work for a client, and the client has a specific amount of money to finance the project.

Clients hope to spend just enough money–not a dollar more– to carry out the project, whether it's a new logo, an interior design for an entire room, a new website, etc. For this reason, clients need a realistic budget for all the costs of your proposal.

The schedule is also relevant since you clarified the expected project completion time. A defined timeline is crucial to help clients understand and track the project's progress. This is one of the most critical steps to getting a job of this nature. So, some questions you need to ask are:

• What is the budget for this product design?

• Is it flexible?

• Does this project require milestones?

• How many milestones will we agree on?

Clarifying the project deliverables is essential for mutual understanding since you and the client know exactly the final product you will deliver. Of course, designers know that the creative process may involve many changes to the project. For this reason, giving a model or sketches to clients to understand your proposal is essential. The questions you need to ask yourself to get the necessary information to clarify deliverables are the following:

• What is the client expecting to receive from you as a final deliverable?

• In what formats the client prefers to receive the project deliverables?

• What resolution will the client expect?

In this section, we're giving you some valuable templates you can use as materials to explain your project's scope and goals, and objectives.

This simple template for a design project provides several sections describing the design process's main aspects. For instance, it brings areas for the project's primary purposes and objective, the target audience, the message, schedule, and deliverables. Besides, this simple template also contains a contact information section so potential clients can quickly contact your design agency.

You can download this basic design brief template from Smartsheet.

Creative design briefs like this are perfect for people and professionals who want to elaborate a plan, explaining their motives and reasons for their designs. This Microsoft Word document has rough space for describing the project overview, general and specific tasks, key dates, consultations, audience, insights, objectives, call to action, and more.

If you like to explain your design with words in addition to displaying it, this is the perfect template for design projects.

You can download this creative brief template from Templatelab.

As its name indicates, this template is thought for video creators who want to explain the general project scope of their vision. This comprehensive design brief contains clearly defined sections for general information, video details, such as video length, channels, devices, and creative details, such as the video tone, look and feel, the desired reaction, and tagline. So, you can insert all the valuable information on the same page and print it or send it to the client's customers.

You can download this video creative brief template from Aha.io.

This template looks more modern and avant-garde than the ones mentioned above. It's also more extensive and divides the document into several sections to better understand the client's opinion. For instance, it contains a project info section, building details, spatial relations of the design, and the creation of any room integrated into the project. It even integrates a space for the logo design. In summary, this is a well-achieved document for designers or construction professionals planning to solve a big design problem.

You can download this concept design brief template from Templatelab.

Creating an excellent design brief involves using proper software or application to edit the template or build the document from scratch. You can use specialized software, such as Photoshop or Illustrator, for such purposes, but we recommend using Microsoft Office applications since these apps are easier to manage. Besides, all templates shared in the previous section are Word or Excel documents.

Here, on RoyalCDKeys, you can quickly get a reliable Microsoft Office activation key to create your document or edit the previously-shared templates. Get all the most famous Microsoft apps to create your new product design brief.

All the above questions will help you clarify your proposal's purpose. Besides, a good design brief should start knowing the design project's context by answering those questions. It will help you define your design's overall scope and measurable results.

If you need other relevant tools for your company, browse our blog. Here you'll find several templates to make informed design decisions, propose products, and provide professional services.