Strategy
How to brief a creative studio, on one page
The eight questions that turn a vague idea into a proposal you can compare, with a template to copy.
Most projects that go wrong were already going wrong in the brief. Not because the brief was short, but because it answered the wrong questions. A good brief does not describe the solution. It describes the problem well enough that two different studios could propose two different solutions, and you could still compare them fairly.
Here is the one page we wish every client sent us. Copy it, fill it in, and send it to anyone you are talking to.
The one-page brief
- What is happening now? Two or three sentences on the situation. “Our bookings come almost entirely from one booking platform and we pay 18% on each one” is more useful than “we need a new website”.
- What should be different in a year? The change you want, in plain words. If you can put a number on it, do: more direct bookings, fewer support emails, a higher price point.
- Who is it for? The people whose behaviour needs to change. Describe one of them as a person, not a segment.
- What do they think of you today? Honest is better than flattering. If you do not know, say so; finding out can be part of the work.
- What already exists? Brand guidelines, an old website, a codebase, research, a pitch deck. Send links, even if you are not proud of them.
- What is fixed? A launch date, a trade show, a board meeting, a technology you must keep, a regulator you must satisfy.
- What is the budget? A range is enough. Without one, every studio guesses, and you end up comparing guesses instead of ideas.
- How will you decide? Who signs off, what matters most to them, and when you need to choose.
Why the budget question matters most
Clients often hold the budget back, worried that a studio will simply spend all of it. In practice the opposite happens. A range lets a studio tell you what is realistic: what the money buys, what it does not, and where to spend it first. Without it, one proposal assumes a template and another assumes a year of custom work, and neither is useful to you.
A brief without a budget is a request for a price. A brief with a budget is a request for an idea.
What to leave out
You do not need to specify colours, fonts, page counts or the technology stack, unless they are genuinely fixed. Writing “we want something modern and clean” tells a studio almost nothing; every brief says it. Spend those words on question two instead.
What a good studio will do next
A studio that has read your brief properly should come back with questions before it comes back with a price. Expect a conversation about what success looks like, who the audience really is, and which part of the problem matters most. If the first reply is a quote, it is worth asking how they arrived at it.
At HAIKUU we usually answer a brief with a short call, then a written proposal that restates the problem in our own words. If we have misunderstood it, that is where you will see it, and it costs nothing to fix at that stage.
Use it
If you are about to brief us, you do not need to format anything. Answer the eight questions in an email, or start a project and the form will ask you the essentials.
