Why a brief at all.
A brief isn't a request for a proposal. It's the first working document of the project, one you'll reread four months later at final acceptance and check the result against.
Because of this non-obvious function, it's usually written badly. "We need a site, budget 500k, timeline a month" isn't a brief, it's a statement of intent. From a document like that a studio can't propose anything serious. Not out of spite, but because it doesn't understand the task.
A good brief is one and a half to five pages of text. Not slides. Not voice messages. Text — because only text forces you to formulate a thought precisely. In slides you can hide uncertainty behind a screenshot; in text you can't.
Text, not a deck.
A brief in Keynote format is a bad brief for a structural reason. Slides force you to compress; a brief should do the opposite — give context. Ten bullets on a "Goals" slide aren't goals, they're an attempt to avoid answering "what is your one main goal."
A Google Docs or Notion document with subheadings and paragraphs is the right format. You can drop two or three reference images at the bottom, but they should be captioned: "this is for tone," "this is for typography," "this is for overall structure." Not "I just like it."
A page and a half is the minimum that lets a studio understand who you are. Five pages is normal for a mid-size project. Twenty is too much, and usually means you're trying to sell the studio a solution rather than a task.
What's mandatory.
- The task. Not "make a site." But: "attract five international clients in Q4 in the Family Office category." Specific, measurable, with an indication of who you're selling to.
- The audience. With company names or roles, if you can. Age and gender aren't needed. What's needed — what the LinkedIn profile looks like of the person who should open the site and write to you five minutes later.
- The budget. As a range. A studio that refuses to answer without a number is right. Without a budget you're comparing the incomparable: one studio proposes a landing page for 200k, another a premium showcase for one and a half million. Those are two different products.
- The timeline. With a rationale, if it's hard. "For the conference on October 15" is a timeline. "The faster the better" isn't a timeline, it's a signal that there's no plan.
- The constraints. Legal, IT policy, brand limits, past traumas (e.g. "the last site did X — we don't want that again"). These are the most valuable lines in the brief.
What's optional.
Moodboards. Ready-made solution ideas. "Do it like X, only better." These can be attached, but as context, not as a requirement.
A studio that needs your moodboards to understand the task is a weak studio. A good studio, from a description of the audience and tone, will propose its own visual language. That, in fact, is what you're paying for.
The brief is the task. The solution is our part.
If you already have hard visual requirements (say, a corporate guideline book that can't be broken), that's a constraint, not a moodboard. It belongs in the "Constraints" section, not in "We want it like."
What not to do.
Don't write "make it like Apple" / "like Stripe" / "like Linear." These are companies with teams of twenty to fifty thousand and a decade of accumulated design debt. You won't get "like them" for one and a half million rubles. If that phrase appears in a brief without an explanation of what exactly you like, it's a signal you haven't broken the reference down into components.
Don't write "a universal site for all audiences." A site for everyone is a site for no one. If your business serves several different audiences, say which is first. The rest are the next iterations.
Don't write a brief without involving the top decision-maker. If the person who signs the budget hasn't read the brief and commented on it, the project will collapse at the acceptance stage. Guaranteed.
Tone.
A brief is a document where it's worth being honest to the point of discomfort. If there's a person on the board who will cut any idea — write it down. If you personally aren't sure about the project but have to do it — that too. If a previous site fell apart because of a specific agency — name what exactly went wrong.
A studio should choose you the way you choose it. A crooked brief leads to a crooked project. A good studio will react to an honest brief in one of two ways: either "yes, we understand, let's start," or "a polite decline, this project isn't ours." Both answers are useful.
A template brief is a template project. One to one.
What we do with a bad brief.
We call. One hour, two, three. We help rewrite it. If it still doesn't come together, we politely decline and recommend colleagues whose format fits better.
This step takes us, on average, six to eight hours a week — on briefs we won't end up taking. It's part of a calendar we deliberately don't "optimize." Simply because a good brief doesn't arrive on its own — it's written together, and a bad studio prefers to stay silent and wait for the brief to "ripen" instead of helping.
If you like our format, start the brief today. If it comes out three pages of five — send it. We'll read it and help finish it. This isn't a "free consultation," it's just a reasonable way to work.