The smoothest projects I've ever worked on all started the same way — and it had nothing to do with budget.

It wasn't the clients with the biggest budgets who got the best results, or even the ones who'd worked with designers before. It was the ones who'd done a small amount of thinking before our first conversation. Not a full brief, not a mood board, not anything formal — just three things sorted out in their own head first. Everything after that moved faster, cost less, and landed closer to what they actually wanted.

Here's what those three things are, and why skipping them quietly costs you time and money later — whether you end up working with me or with someone else entirely.

“ The brief isn't a formality you complete for the designer's sake — it's the thing that decides how many rounds it takes to get somewhere you're happy. ”

1. Who you're actually designing for

This sounds obvious, and most people think they've already answered it. But "small businesses" or "young professionals" isn't an audience — it's a category. The brands that come together quickly are the ones where someone can describe an actual person: what they care about, what they're sceptical of, where they'd come across this business in the first place.

You don't need a formal persona document. You need to be able to finish this sentence: "The kind of person who'd choose us over the alternative is someone who…" If you can finish that in one honest sentence, you've already saved yourself several rounds of "I'm not sure, it just doesn't feel right yet" — which is almost always a sign that the audience wasn't pinned down, not that the design is wrong.

2. What you actually like — and can point to

Every client has a sense of what they want. The ones who get there fastest are the ones who've translated that sense into something they can show, not just describe.

"Modern but warm" means something different to every single person who says it. A handful of screenshots — brands you admire, even ones that have nothing to do with your industry — does more in five minutes than twenty minutes of adjectives. It's not about copying anything. It's about giving your designer a starting point that's closer to your actual taste than a guess would be, so the early concepts feel like a conversation instead of a coin flip.

3. What "done" looks like to you — and roughly what it's worth

This is the one people skip most often, usually because it feels awkward to talk about money before the work has started. But vague expectations on scope and budget are the single biggest source of frustration on both sides of a project — not because anyone's being difficult, but because two people are quietly imagining two different projects.

You don't need to know the exact number. You need a rough sense of what you're hoping to walk away with (just a logo? a full identity? a website too?) and roughly what that feels like it should cost you. That's enough for a good designer to tell you, honestly, whether your expectations and your budget are pointing at the same project — before either of you has spent real time on it.

Why this matters more than the brief template itself

None of this requires a formal document. I've had five-line emails turn into some of my favourite projects, because the person had clearly already done this thinking — even if they hadn't written it down. And I've had beautifully formatted briefs that still needed three conversations to get to the same place, because the thinking underneath hadn't actually happened yet.

The format doesn't matter. The clarity does.

Want a head start on this?

I put these three things — plus two more that come up just as often — into a single one-page checklist you can work through in about fifteen minutes. It's free, it's not industry-specific, and it's genuinely useful before you brief anyone, not just me.

→ Send me the Small Business Rebrand Checklist

No spam — just the checklist, and the occasional useful thing about branding and websites.

If you've already got a project in mind and want to talk it through before you put pen to paper, that's exactly what I'm here for.

→ Email me about your project