Writing a brief for a designer or copywriter
Investing in somebody to do your brand identity, or writing copy for your brand is a big thing. You want to make sure you make the most of the investment.
If you’re briefing a designer or copywriter, or want to create some parameters around creating your own brand vice or visuals here are some pointers on what to put into your brief.
Write an overview of your business
This takes everything we’ve done around your values, your USP and your brand’s personality and rolls it into a paragraph or two about your business. Your visuals should get across what it’s like to work with you and back up your key messages. Think about:
What are the key things you want to get across about your business? Your values? Vision or ultimate end goal? Your brand mission?
What is it that’s different about you that can be reflected through your identity?
What are your goals? Why are you rebranding?
Who is the audience?
Designer and Writer Frank Chimero said, "people ignore design that ignores people." Great brands should attract the right audience so a designer or copywriter should know who they’re creating the work for. If you’re DIYing it, it can be tempting to choose what you like, so make sure you’re sense-checking it against your audience’s values, needs, and preferences.
Share your customer avatars with your designer or copywriter so they know who they’re aiming their work at.
Who are your competitors?
I’m going to caveat that the purpose of looking at your competitors isn’t to copy them, it’s to make sure you’re not copying them. Be aware of any common visual styles that you might want to avoid, or any language in your industry that just turns you off.
Knowing what you don’t want is often better than knowing what you do want when it comes to briefing a creative who’ll be working on your brand.
What’s the scope?
Write a list of all the things you need as part of the brief. Think about:
Your logo: do you need just one version or will you need an icon? Does your logo need to fit into any specific places (such as a long thin website banner)
Do you just want the basics (logo, colour, font) or do you want patterns and graphics you can use too?
Do you need any icons or anything else to represent what you do?
What social channels are you on? Do you need graphics for them?
Are there any other assets you’ll need? It used to be things like letterheads and business cards. These days it might be digital templates or presentation designs.
What existing assets / copy have you got?
Is there anything you’ve got currently that you want to keep, such as your logo, particular imagery that might influence the designs, or copy you want to use?
For designers, having copy to work with when coming up with concepts is super useful, and it helps you to visualise how it’ll look it the end.
Copywriters want to know about the personality of your brand to flow that into your tone, so give them as much info as possible.
If you’re DIYing your brand, make sure you’ve got everything together in your Blueprint before starting so you know what you need it to reflect.
What do you want to portray?
What’s your brand’s personality?
Have you created any mood boards of the vibe you want, or can you share the examples of the brands you like?
How should your audience feel when interacting with you? (Your voice and visuals feed into this feeling)
What’s the budget and timeline?
When do you want to launch your new identity and do you have a budget you can spend on it? You may want to send this brief to a couple of designers to get an idea of the cost if you don’t have a clue how much it’ll be.
If you’re DIYing you probably still want to set yourself a deadline so you don’t end up tweaking it forever.