The 5-page brand brief that saves rounds of revisions
Before any design starts, write the brief. I'd put five pages in it, and each one saves a round of changes later.
I think most of the back-and-forth on a brand or website project comes from decisions nobody wrote down. The designer sends the first logo, and the owner says it doesn’t feel like the company. Then the homepage goes out for review, and a partner asks where the old green went. Fair comments, both of them. Each one still sends the designer back to guess again, and every guess is another round you pay for.
You can head off most of that by making those decisions first, in writing, while changing your mind costs a conversation instead of a redesign. That’s the job of a brief. I’d keep it to five pages with one question on each, and I’d want every question answered in plain words before anyone opens a design program. If yours fits on three pages, even better.
Where the extra rounds come from
Some rounds of changes are healthy. You see a real design, you notice what’s off, and the next version gets closer. The rounds that cost you are the ones that start over. Someone is reacting to a question nobody settled at the start, and you can usually tell which question from what they say:
| What you might hear | The decision nobody made | Page |
|---|---|---|
| “It looks good, but our customers won’t go for it.” | Who the customer is, and what they compare you to | 1 |
| “It doesn’t feel like us.” | How the company should come across | 2 |
| “Can we add our awards?” or “We can’t say that.” | What’s true, and what you’re allowed to claim | 3 |
| “That’s not what we call it.” | The words your customers and your staff use | 4 |
| “The old logo stays,” or “My partner hasn’t seen this yet.” | What’s already decided, and who signs off | 5 |
Each of those is a reasonable thing to say. You’d rather hear it before the design than after, when acting on it costs a whole round.
Page 1: Who it’s for, and what they’re choosing between
Start with the person who decides whether to hire you, meaning the one or two kinds of buyers whose yes pays the bills. Then answer four questions about them:
- What are they trying to get done when they go looking for someone like you?
- What worries them about hiring the wrong company?
- Who else are they comparing you to?
- What would make them put it off for another year?
I’d spend the most time on the last two. Your competition includes the bigger firm and the cheaper crew, and it also includes the customer who decides to do it themselves, or to wait. If you’re not sure of the answers, ask a few recent customers why they picked you and who else they talked to. They’ll tell you more than a branding meeting will.
Without this page, you can end up with a design that’s good and aimed at the wrong person. A homepage that would charm a homeowner can lose a business buyer who came looking for a safety record and a list of past projects.
Page 2: What you want them to feel and believe
This page can feel soft to write. It’s also the page that answers “it doesn’t feel like us,” so I wouldn’t skip it.
Pick three to five words for how the company should come across, and next to each one, write what it shouldn’t turn into. A law firm might want to sound experienced without sounding old-fashioned, and confident without sounding loud. The second half of each pair is the part a designer can’t guess on their own.
Then write one sentence: the thing a customer should believe after a minute on your site. If the owners can’t agree on that sentence, you’d rather find out now than in the middle of a logo review.
For Salandria, a Toronto demolition company that’s been at it since 2002, we settled the feel before any design work. The new site had to look current without losing the gritty, industrial legacy that built the company, and it couldn’t look like a startup. With that in place, we chose the visuals to match: bold type, structured layouts, raw photos of real job sites, and colors pulled from concrete, steel, and equipment yellow.
Once you’ve written this page, you can turn “it doesn’t feel like us” into a note the designer can work with. Hold the design up against your words and say which one it misses.
Page 3: The facts and the proof
Page three is a plain list of what’s true and what you can show: years in business, licenses, certifications, insurance, notable projects, reviews, and any numbers you can stand behind, each with where it came from. If a number has no source, leave it off.
Photos belong here too. If the brief says you’ll use real photos of your work, somebody has to take them, and it’s easier to plan that at the start than to discover it when the design is finished and the photo spots are empty.
Page three should also say what you can’t claim. If you’re a law firm, put your state bar’s advertising rules on this page and check them yourself before anyone writes copy. Writing within the rules from the start is a lot less work than rewriting finished pages to fit them.
Skip this page, and you’ll probably get a late round of “wait, we can’t say that,” or a finished design that sits there while someone hunts for photos and numbers.
Page 4: The words to use and the words to avoid
On a lot of projects, someone writes the real copy after the design is done, into boxes sized for placeholder text. Then it doesn’t fit, or it sounds like a different company than the design does. You can head that off with a short list on page four: what you call your services, what your customers call them, some phrases you like, and some you never want to see.
The never-say list is where I’d spend the time. One line like “no ‘we are passionate about’ copy” rules out a whole style of writing, and anyone on your team can check a draft against it.
Keep the page short. If it grows into something your whole team writes from, that’s a voice guide, and I’d keep that to one page as well. I wrote up the format I’d use in How to write a brand voice guide your team will actually use.
Without this page, the copy round fills up with “that’s not what we call it” and “we’d never say that.” Those are easy fixes on a list and slow ones in a finished layout.
Page 5: The decisions already made
The last page lists what’s already settled:
- colors you have to keep, and colors you can’t use
- the parts of the logo that stay, and the name and tagline if they’re staying
- everywhere the brand has to work, from the website to the trucks, the signs, and the ads
- the platform your website runs on, if it isn’t changing
- the budget
Then write down who makes the final call. Name one person. Other people should give input, and it helps, but with one name on the page nobody has to wonder whose call it is.
If nothing has to stay, write that down too. We built a brand for Igor Presman, a Miami luxury realtor who had no logo or website to keep, so his page five would have been close to blank. That’s useful for a designer to know, because it means the whole identity is open. The 6-week brand sprint we ran for him ended with a brand book and a voice guide, and we built his website and ads on top of them.
If you skip this page, you risk the round that stings most: everyone likes the design until someone who wasn’t in the room points out that it changed the one thing that couldn’t change.
Once it’s written
A brief only helps if people keep using it. Have the person who signs off read it closely and agree to it before design starts, because fixing a sentence in the brief costs nothing and fixing it in a finished design costs a round.
Check each round of feedback against the brief. A comment that fits it is a fix. A comment that contradicts it means you stop and decide which one is right. Sometimes the brief was wrong, and then you change it on purpose before you change the design.
Reread it before every review. I think five pages is about the most anyone will reread that often. Most teams read a longer brief once, at the kickoff, and then it sits in a folder.
You can write most of this yourself in an afternoon, with the people who know your customers best, and your designer will do better work because they aren’t guessing. If you’d rather have us do it with you, that’s what our brand work is for.