Whether you’re starting a new venture, or need to upgrade your existing brand, the best place to start is to simply articulate what you’re looking for in a design brief. This post features a creative brief outline that has worked well for me in the past. Two quick notes before I jump in:

1. It’s Only an Outline – The outline below is fairly straight forward and is designed as the starting point to a significant conversation about the creative work of branding. Filling in the outlines may require some serious soul searching for your organization, in combination with some exercises, but that’s not the focus of this post.
2. It’s For You Too – The design brief is as much for you as it is for your creative team. In other words, starting a creative brief is about being prepared before engaging a creative team. It’ll save you time, communicate that you’re organized and professional, and raise the bar for the relationship. Once the conversation gets started your creative team with typically iterate, improve, and possibly re-articulate the brief based on additional questions and clarifications.

Also, a big thanks to Jon Scheuning over at Pentagram who got me thinking about this when he shared a creative brief outline that he uses with me last year.

Let’s Clarify Some Terms

People use the word “branding” to mean differnt things. This is what I mean:

• Re-Brand – This is when a product or service that is sold under one brand switches it’s affiliation to a new brand. Often the goal here is to reposition the product or move upmarket.
• Brand Refresh – This is when an existing brand has fallen out of date and requires reworking to update it to contemporary standards. Brand refresh can be a regular review process to evolve a brand to reflect market change.
• Brand Re-Staging – This is similar to a brand refresh, but is more focused on altering the context and supporting brand elements associated with the brand in order to evolve it. For example a brand identity mark, or logo, may remain essentially the same while the supporting brand elements (pallet, patterns, secondary elements, backgrounds, etc) can change significantly.

Structure for The Brief

The creative brief anticipates a series of high level questions, so each section is positioned as an answer to a question. I’ve thrown in some sample answers to give you the gist of what good answers might look like. As a general rule, keep the language as active and as concise as possible.

What we want (what are your highest level goals?)

• Develop our identity system to support our next stage of growth.
• Make the system, and its associated assets, accessible, thus enabling consistent application.

How it will help our business (what are the expected business impacts of this project?)

• Drive consistent brand experience across touch-points.
• Build on existing brand equity and support line extension.

What we’ll get (what are the deliverables at the end of the project?)

• A re-staged brand identity that
  • includes a broader visual vocabulary than the current system.
• A style guide, including
  • a color palette set,
  • primary and secondary type faces,
  • imagery,
  • a series of exhibits and templates,
  • a selection of sample applications including _____, ______, ________.
  • a set of brand guidelines, to help our internal team apply the system across a variety of media.

Some Boundaries (are there any limits, or major specifications, that we must incorporate?)

• The brand mark will be used extensively in rich media and must be able to support animation builds.

Who this is for (tell us about your target market?)

• Our services are targeted to _______ audiences, here’s how they typically discover our brand, here’s how they perceive us now, etc.
• Here are the markets we’d like to move into, here’s how we’d like to gain brand awareness in this area, etc

Make the right impression (how do you want people to respond to your brand?)

• Our business is complicated and hard to explain, we want a brand that will support simpler communications.
• Different communities interpret our brand differently, which causes problems. We’d want a brand that is perceived more consistently.
• We want something that lets people know that we’re committed to doing well by doing good.

We’ll know it worked when (how will we know if it worked?)
To be successful, the restaged brand identity system should:

• increase perceived value of our brand and recognition through internal surveying,
• increase consistency across communications, and
• win strong internal buy-in.

Who we are (can you summarize what your brand is about?)

Our company was founded in ______ by _______ with a strong record for ________.  We have grown into ________. As we grew, we developed a logo, and used it to put our stamp on identity materials across a variety of media. To this point, these materials have served our needs, in part because ________. Recently, we began  diversifying our practice from a traditional focus on ________, seeking clients who work in adjacent industries, serve market sectors and geographies in which our brand is relatively, or even completely, unknown.  To meet this challenge, we need a more ______, ______, and _______ brand identity system.

What We Do (can you summarize your business?)
Our company is unique in_________. We also ________. Here is how we currently describe our services: [insert company boilerplate]

Our Personality (pick five words that summarize your ideal brand personality)

• Smart
• Frank
• Frugal
• Fit
• Pragmatic

Our Values
 & Mission (summarize your values and mission)

• Insert existing company boilerplate

How we fit in (summarize how you are positioned in the market place)

In our industry there are three kinds of service providers, those that are seen as ______, those that are seen as _________, and those that are seen as _________. Relative to these perceptions we are positioned as _________.

A list of companies that do what we do: (list the top ten companies you see as your primary competitors, and peers?)

• Company
• Company
• Company
• Company
• Company
• etc