task-ops
Searching for a design project brief example usually means one of two situations. Either a brief has to go out by tomorrow and a starting shape would save an hour, or the last project went badly and the brief is the suspected cause. The second situation is the more common one, and templates rarely help with it. A blank template with fourteen headings produces a document that looks like a brief and still fails in exactly the same place the last one did.
What follows is one worked example, read line by line, plus the parts that decide whether a brief holds up in week six. The example is deliberately short. Long briefs are not more thorough, they are harder to argue with, and the sections that actually prevent trouble are three or four lines each.
A brief exists to settle a small number of questions before anybody spends money on the wrong answer. What the work is for, how success will be judged, what is out of scope, who decides, and what the boundaries are on time and money. Once those are written and agreed, a designer can make hundreds of small decisions without asking, which is the point.
A brief is not a specification. A specification describes what to build. A brief describes what the result has to achieve and the constraints it has to respect. Putting layout instructions into a brief converts the designer into a pair of hands and removes the one thing worth buying, which is judgement about how to reach the stated outcome.
Three documents get confused with each other, and the confusion matters when the same person has to produce all three.
| Document | Question it answers | Who it is written for |
|---|---|---|
| Project brief | What needs to change in the business, by when, within what budget | The whole team, including finance and the sponsor |
| Design brief | What the design has to achieve, for whom, and within what constraints | The designer or the design partner |
| Creative brief | What the idea has to make the audience feel or do | Copywriters, art direction, campaign teams |
On a small team all three often collapse into one page, and that is fine as long as the design section still names the audience, the success measure and the boundaries. The failure is a brief that is entirely project management, with schedule and budget filled in and the audience left as everybody.
What follows is an illustrative example for a small project, written for a fictional client. The whole thing fits on one page on purpose.
Client and project. Harbour Bakery, a regional chain of seven shops. Redesign of the online ordering pages for click and collect.
Background. Ordering moved online two years ago and the pages have not changed since. Phone orders still outnumber online orders at five of the seven shops. Staff report that customers call to ask questions the pages already answer.
The problem to solve. Customers who reach the ordering pages on a phone frequently leave before choosing a collection time. The current flow asks for an account before it shows collection slots.
Audience. Regular customers aged roughly 30 to 60, ordering on a phone, usually within two hours of collection. Not new visitors researching the brand.
What success looks like. More completed orders from phone traffic, and fewer calls to shops asking about collection times. Both are measured before the work starts and again six weeks after launch.
Scope. The product list, the item page, the collection time picker, and the confirmation screen. Four screens, phone first, with desktop treated as a resize.
Out of scope. Account and login flows, payment provider changes, the marketing homepage, print materials, and anything that requires a change to the till system.
Constraints. Existing brand colours and typeface, no change to the till system, and the collection slot logic stays as it is. Accessibility target is legible text at a small size and tap areas large enough for one handed use.
Decision maker. The operations lead approves. Shop managers are consulted, and their input is gathered once, in week two.
Rounds of revision. Two rounds included on the design phase, with a third available at an agreed rate. Feedback is consolidated into one list per round rather than sent as it arrives.
Timeline. Kickoff in week one, first concepts week three, revisions weeks four and five, handover week six.
Budget. A fixed figure agreed before kickoff, with the rate for additional rounds written into the same document.
Read that back and notice what is absent. There is no instruction about layout, no colour direction beyond the existing brand, and no reference site to imitate. Notice also that every line is either a fact somebody can verify or a decision somebody has made.
The first version of a brief like the one above usually reads very differently, and the gap between the two is where most projects are won or lost. A typical first draft says something close to this: the ordering pages look dated and need a refresh, the audience is customers, the aim is a modern and clean look, the timeline is as soon as possible, and the budget is to be discussed.
Every line in that draft is a problem disguised as a sentence.
Looks dated is not a problem, it is a symptom, and it cannot be verified after launch. The version that works names the observed behaviour instead: customers on phones leave before choosing a collection time, and staff take calls about information already on the page. Those two statements can be checked before and after.
Customers as an audience rules nothing out, which means it also rules nothing in. Once the audience becomes regular customers ordering on a phone within two hours of collection, several arguments are settled in advance. Large photography loses to fast loading. A tour of the brand loses to a shorter path to the collection slots.
Modern and clean is the single most expensive phrase in design work, because it is unfalsifiable. Two people can look at the same screen and disagree about whether it has been achieved, and the disagreement has no resolution except authority. Replacing it with a measurable outcome removes an entire category of review meeting.
As soon as possible and to be discussed are both deferrals, and each one becomes a negotiation at the worst moment. A date and a figure written before kickoff are easier to agree than the same date and figure argued about in week five with work already done.
Rewriting a weak brief is mostly this exercise, repeated line by line. For each sentence, ask whether somebody could tell six weeks later whether it had been satisfied. Sentences that fail that test get replaced with an observation, a number, or a name.
Most brief templates list somewhere between ten and twenty sections. In practice a handful carry the weight, and the rest are context that could be a link.
| Section | What it decides | What happens when it is missing |
|---|---|---|
| The problem to solve | Whether the design is judged as a solution or as taste | Reviews become opinion, and the loudest opinion wins |
| Audience | Which trade offs are acceptable | Design aimed at everybody, defended by nobody |
| Success measure | When the project is finished | The project ends when the budget ends |
| Out of scope | What is not being bought | Steady expansion, unbudgeted, described as small additions |
| Decision maker | Whose approval closes a round | Contradictory feedback from four people, no way to resolve it |
| Rounds of revision | Where the commercial line sits | Unlimited revision, resented on both sides |
The single most useful line in the list is the out of scope section, and it is the one most often skipped, because writing it feels negative at the start of a friendly project. It is the opposite. A brief that names what is excluded is the document that lets a designer say yes to a late request with a date and a figure attached, rather than absorbing it quietly and missing the deadline.
One named decision maker. Not a committee and not a department. On projects that run long, the cause is frequently that three people can each request changes and none of them can give final approval. Naming one approver is not about hierarchy, it is about making rounds closable. Consultation still happens, at a stated point, gathered into one list.
Consolidated feedback, once per round. Feedback arriving as it occurs to people is the most expensive way to run a design phase. Each message costs a context switch and a partial rework, and the messages contradict each other. One list per round, from one person, is the arrangement that keeps two rounds actually being two rounds.
What is already decided and not open for discussion. Brand colours, the platform, the deadline, the till system. Listing these prevents a concept that solves the problem beautifully and cannot be built. Designers are not annoyed by constraints, they are annoyed by constraints that appear in week four.
A brief usually dies as a document within two weeks. It is attached to an email, or sits in a folder, and by the time the arguments start nobody is reading it. The arguments then get settled from memory, which favours whoever remembers most confidently.
The mechanical fix is unglamorous. The brief lives where the work lives, as a description on the first card of the project or as a pinned item on the board, so that anybody looking at a task can reach the reasons behind it. When feedback arrives, it goes as comments in the same place, which means the record of why round two looks different from round one writes itself. A board that holds a rich description, attachments and a comment thread on the same card can hold the brief and the argument about the brief together, and the Features page shows what a card carries.
One more habit is worth adopting. When a decision changes the brief, the brief gets edited, and the change is noted in the comments with a date. A brief that quietly diverges from what the team is actually doing is worse than no brief, because it gets cited during the disagreement it no longer describes. Teams weighing up whether documents like this belong in the same place as tasks or in a separate workspace will find the split covered in the Pinateca vs Notion notes.
Take the brief for the current project and add the three missing lines: one named approver, feedback consolidated once per round, and an explicit out of scope list. Then move the brief from the email thread to the first card on the board so it is still readable in week six. If the next step is keeping the brief, the tasks and the feedback in one place rather than three, Pinateca is free for up to five people and ten boards.
One page for a small project, two or three for something running several months. Length is not thoroughness. A brief earns its keep through the problem statement, the audience, the success measure, the out of scope list, the named approver and the revision terms, and every one of those is two to four lines. Anything longer tends to be background that could be a link.
The client owns the problem and the constraints, so the first draft comes from that side, but the useful version is almost always written together. A common arrangement is that the client writes the background, the problem and the budget, the designer proposes the success measure, the scope and the revision terms, and both sign the merged document before any design work begins.
A design brief states what the design has to achieve and the constraints it works within, such as audience, platform, brand and deadline. A creative brief is narrower and concerns the idea itself, meaning what the audience should feel, understand or do. Small teams frequently combine them, which works as long as the combined document still names one audience and one measure of success.
Two is the common arrangement for a design phase, with additional rounds available at a stated rate. The number matters less than the two conditions around it: feedback consolidated into one list per round, and one person who can approve. Unlimited revision without those conditions is where small projects lose their margin and their goodwill.