Write the design brief
with the direction beside the words.

Start from what the client told you, then fill ten fields: background, goal, audience, key message and tone, deliverables with specs, references, mandatories, budget, timeline with the decision maker, and success measures. Put two or three reference images beside every field that describes a look. Send it for review before any design starts, and treat every empty field as a question for the client rather than a guess.

Ten cover most jobs. Project background, goal, audience, key message and tone, deliverables with formats and sizes, references and direction, mandatories and constraints, budget, timeline with the named decision maker, and success measures. The two most often left blank are budget and decision maker, and both cause the most expensive problems later: a direction nobody can afford, and feedback from people who contradict each other.

A short one: 'Rebrand for a neighbourhood café. Goal: win customers under 35 without losing regulars. Audience: local professionals who work from cafés. Tone: warm, unfussy, a little playful, with three references each. Deliverables: logo in SVG and PNG, menu, window signage. Mandatory: keep the green. Budget: range agreed. Two review rounds, owner signs off, final files in eight weeks. Success: regulars recognise it, newcomers notice it.'

A design brief defines a design deliverable, such as a logo, a website or packaging, so it leans on specs, references and mandatories. A creative brief defines a campaign or piece of content, so it leans on the insight, the key message and the channels. Most of the structure is shared. Storyflow's creative brief template covers the campaign version and how it turns into a production plan.

Send a view-only link rather than an attachment. The client opens the board in a browser with no account and sees the latest version whenever they reload, so nobody reviews last week's draft. To leave a note they sign in and comment beside the field in question. Agree what counts as sign-off, such as a written yes from the named decision maker, because Storyflow has no approval button.

Five to nine, in two labelled groups: what to aim for and what to avoid. Fewer than five and the designer fills the gaps with their own taste; more than a dozen and the brief stops pointing anywhere. Write one line under each reference saying what to take from it, such as the colour, the type or the photography, because clients often like an image for a reason the designer cannot guess.

It can draft one. Describe the project or paste the client's email and Storyflow's AI lays out the fields on the board, so you can see at a glance which ones the client never answered, often the budget and the decision maker. You check every field against what the client actually told you. The AI proposes, you decide, and its edits apply with one-click Undo. For a draft from one line, see the AI design brief generator.

A document when the job is text-led and the client wants a file on record. A board when the direction is visual, because the references sit next to the words that need them. Storyflow does both: write the fields in a Doc on the board, which exports to Word or PDF and has inline comment threads, and keep the references and the plan around it on the canvas.

It becomes the plan. Each deliverable turns into a ticket with an assignee and a due date, the reference groups become the starting moodboard, and the review rounds go into a table with a date column, rows kept in date order. In Storyflow all of that sits on the same board as the brief, so every concept is judged against what was asked for rather than what people remember.

Not during early access. Storyflow is paid-only during early access, with plans from $7.99 a month billed annually ($9.99 monthly). A free plan launches before the end of 2026, and anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free. Clients viewing a brief by link never need an account. For a free option today, Google Docs handles a text-only brief well.

Four come up constantly. A goal that is really a style ('make it modern'). Deliverables without specs, which invite scope arguments. Tone words without reference images, which every reader pictures differently. And no named decision maker, which produces contradictory feedback in round two. Each one is cheap to fix before design starts and expensive to fix after the first concepts are shown.