A design brief template has eight sections: the ask, the problem, the audience, the deliverables, the brand rules, the constraints, how success is judged, and who approves it. Fill those in and a designer can start without booking a second meeting.
Most briefs fail in the middle of that list. The ask is clear, the deadline is clear, and then the direction is "modern, clean, premium". Three rounds later someone says the logo cannot be redrawn, which nobody had written down, and the deadline that looked comfortable in week one is gone.
Below is what to write in each of the eight sections, a design brief template you can copy, and what to do with the brand section so you stop retyping the same hex values into every new brief. If you have no current source to point that section at yet, start with our brand guidelines template.
Key Takeaways
- A design brief template covers eight sections: the ask, the problem, the audience, the deliverables, the brand, the constraints, success, and approval.
- Write constraints, not adjectives. "No new typefaces, the card radius stays at 4px" settles what "clean" never will.
- The brand section is the same in every brief you write, so link to one current source instead of pasting values that go stale.
- Name one approver and a number of revision rounds in the brief itself, before the work starts.
- TrueKeep keeps the brand half in a portal and serves it to Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor through an MCP connection, so the brief carries only what is specific to the project.
What a design brief is
A design brief is a short document that states the problem a piece of work has to solve, the constraints it has to respect, and how it will be judged. It is written before the work starts, usually by whoever is commissioning it, and it is agreed by both sides.
It is not a specification and it is not a set of instructions. A brief that says "put the headline top left in 48px Inter" has replaced the designer. A brief that says "the offer has to be readable in three seconds on a phone" has given them a problem worth solving. The Design Council's Double Diamond makes the same split: defining the problem is a separate phase from developing the answer, and the brief is where the first one ends.
Two people read the finished brief and want different things from it. The brand manager reads it to check that the work will come back on-brand. The designer reads it to find out what they can and cannot change. Both answers have to be on the same page.
The eight sections a design brief template needs
- The ask. One sentence: what is being made, for whom, and by when. If it takes three sentences, it is probably two projects.
- The problem. What is happening now that should not be, and what is true once this works. This is the section people skip, and it is the one that makes revisions arguable instead of personal.
- The audience. Who sees this, where they see it, and the single action they take next. "Existing customers, in an email on a phone, who click through to the pricing page."
- The deliverables. An exact list of files with formats and dimensions, not "social assets". Four static images at 1080x1080, one at 1200x628, source file included.
- The brand. The rules the work follows, linked rather than retyped, plus any rule that bends for this project and why.
- The constraints. Budget, deadline, technical limits, accessibility requirements, legal copy that cannot be edited, and the things nobody may redraw.
- Success. How this gets judged, in one line, before anyone has an opinion about the color.
- Approval. One named approver, a number of revision rounds, and the date feedback is due.
Sections seven and eight are the ones most templates leave off, and they are the two that decide whether the project ends. A brief without a named approver collects opinions from everyone who walks past the screen.
A design brief template you can copy
Paste this into a document, a ticket, or a shared page, and fill in the brackets. It fits on one screen on purpose.
# Design brief: [project name]
Owner: [name] Ships: [date]
Approver: [one name] Rounds: [number]
## The ask
[One sentence. What is being made, for whom, by when.]
## The problem
Now: [what is happening that should not be]
After: [what is true when this works]
## Audience
[Who sees it, where they see it, the one action they take]
## Deliverables
- [file, format, exact dimensions]
- [file, format, exact dimensions]
- [source file, yes or no]
## Brand
Follows: [link to the current guidelines]
Bends here: [any rule that changes for this project, and why]
## Constraints
Budget: [number]
Technical: [platform, file size limit, build system]
Accessibility: [contrast ratio, minimum type size]
Do not change: [the thing nobody may redraw]
## Success
[One line. How this gets judged.]
## Reference
Like this: [two examples, one line each on why]
Not this: [one example, one line on why]
Pay attention to the reference section at the end. One rejected example with a reason under it ("not this: four typefaces, no clear first read") saves a round of revisions that no adjective would have prevented.
Write constraints, not adjectives
Every weak brief fails the same way. It describes a feeling and leaves the decisions to a conversation that happens later, in feedback, when changing them is expensive.
Vague, and impossible to disagree with:
Make it feel modern and premium, in line with the brand.
Specific, and possible to work from:
Use the existing type scale, no new typefaces. Card corner radius stays at 4px. Body text meets the WCAG 2.2 contrast minimum of 4.5:1 on every background you use. The product photography is fixed, the illustration around it is open.
The second version is shorter to read and longer to write, because someone had to decide. There is a cost to that. The more you pin down, the less room the designer has to solve the problem in a way you had not thought of. Fix what is genuinely fixed, such as the brand, the legal copy, the platform, and leave the rest open. A brief that specifies the layout has stopped being a brief.
The half of the brief you keep rewriting
Read five of your own briefs side by side and the brand section is close to identical in all five: the same hex values, the same logo rules, the same note about which typeface to use, each one copied from a slightly different version of the guidelines.
That copy is the part that goes stale first. A palette changes, a logo variant is retired, and three live briefs still carry the old values because they were pasted in February. The fix is to link once to a source that is current, and use the brand section only for what is specific to this project.
TrueKeep is built for that half. A portal holds four parts, strategy, guide, assets, and components, and the portal setup guide covers what belongs in each. Colors render as swatches, logos at presentation quality, and typography in the actual typeface, so a designer working from your brief copies the value or downloads the file instead of asking for it.
One note on the word, since this industry uses it for two things. TrueKeep calls its own record of brand decisions the design brief: the reasoning behind the brand, written down and kept current. That is not a project brief, it is the source your project briefs should point at.
Write the design brief so an AI tool can use it
These days the brief gets pasted into a chat window as often as it gets sent to a designer. Someone asks Claude for the first layout options, or asks Cursor to build the landing page, and drops the brief in above the prompt. Anything the brief leaves out, the model fills in on its own.
The parts that work for an AI tool are the same parts that work for a new designer: named files, exact dimensions, a list of words the brand avoids, a stated contrast ratio. The parts that fail are the ones that assume shared context, such as "keep it on-brand" or "use your judgment".
The brand half does not have to live in the prompt at all. TrueKeep connects the portal to Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor once through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for giving AI tools access to a source of information, and the AI reads the brand before it starts. A final pass checks the output against the brand and fixes what is off. The guide to using TrueKeep day to day shows the prompts this suits. What you paste in is then only the project: the problem, the audience, the deliverables, the constraints.
A connected portal keeps the brand current. Nothing keeps the project brief current except the person writing it. If the deadline moves or the deliverables change, the brief is wrong until someone edits it.
FAQ
What should a design brief include? Eight sections: the ask, the problem, the audience, the deliverables, the brand rules, the constraints, how success is judged, and who approves it. Each one should end in something checkable, such as a date, a file format, a hex value, or a name.
How long should a design brief be? One page for most projects, two for a rebrand or a full site. Length is the wrong measure. The question is whether a designer who has never met you could start on Monday without asking a question.
What is the difference between a design brief and a creative brief? In practice the terms overlap, and many teams use one document for both. Where they are separated, a creative brief covers the message and the campaign idea, and a design brief covers what actually gets made: the deliverables, the constraints, and the brand rules they follow.
Who writes the design brief, the client or the designer? The person commissioning the work writes the first version, and the designer edits it. A brief the designer has not questioned is usually hiding an assumption. Agree the final version before any work starts.
How do I write a design brief for an AI tool? Write it the same way, then remove the parts that assume shared context. Give named files, exact dimensions, and a list of words the brand avoids rather than "on-brand". With TrueKeep, you connect the portal to Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor through an MCP connection, and the AI connection guide has the setup steps.
What makes a design brief fail? No named problem, no named approver, and direction written as adjectives. Any one of those turns the review into an argument about taste instead of an argument about the problem, and the first kind has no end condition.
Start with the template, then fix the brand half
Fill in the eight sections: the ask, the problem, the audience, the deliverables, the brand, the constraints, success, and approval. Write constraints rather than adjectives, so the work can be checked against something. Name one approver and a number of rounds before the work starts. Add one rejected reference and say why.
Then look at the brand section across your last five briefs. If the values differ, the problem is not the design brief template, it is that there is no single current source for the work to point at. Put the brand in one place your team and their AI tools can both read, and get started with TrueKeep.