What a brief actually is
A web design brief is a 1–3 page document you give to a designer (or fill out together) covering: what your business does, who you're trying to reach, what you want the website to accomplish, and any hard constraints. The brief saves the first two weeks of any project — without one, the discovery phase becomes the brief.
The minimum viable brief
If you only fill out these six fields, the project can start:
- Business in 1 sentence. "We're a Red Deer-based hot sauce company making small-batch habanero and chipotle sauces."
- Website goal. "Drive online orders to Shopify and capture wholesale leads from BC and AB restaurants."
- Target customer. "Home cooks who care about flavor over heat. Secondary: chefs and restaurant buyers."
- What's wrong with your current site. "Site looks generic, products bury the photography, mobile checkout is broken."
- Brands you admire (web design wise). "Blueland.com, Liquid Death, Ezra Cohen's portfolio."
- Hard deadline (if any). "Need to launch before our retail rollout in Q3."
Six fields. 10 minutes of typing. This unblocks 80% of the questions a designer needs answered.
The full brief — for projects over $10K
For larger projects, expand to these additional sections:
Brand context:
- Existing logo and brand assets — do they exist, are they final?
- Voice and tone — formal, casual, technical, playful?
- Color preferences or constraints?
- Existing photography? Budget for new photography?
Functional requirements:
- Pages required (homepage, about, services, contact, blog, etc.)
- E-commerce? If yes, how many products, what's the catalog complexity?
- CMS access for editors? Who edits content?
- Integrations — CRM, email marketing, calendar, payment, scheduling?
- Multi-language?
- Accessibility requirements?
Technical context:
- Current platform — what are you migrating from?
- Existing analytics — Google Analytics, Hotjar, etc.?
- Domain ownership — do you control DNS?
- Email — where does it route currently?
SEO context:
- Existing keywords you rank for (Google Search Console screenshot if available)
- Top 5 pages by current traffic
- Pending URL changes that affect SEO equity
Stakeholders:
- Who has approval authority?
- Who reviews design rounds?
- Who reviews development milestones?
- Final sign-off authority?
Budget and timeline:
- Total budget range — be honest, not aspirational
- Hard deadlines vs soft preferences
- Phased delivery acceptable?
Brands you admire — how to pick
This question comes up in every brief. Three rules:
- Pick 3-5 brands. Not 1, not 15. One example doesn't give a designer enough signal. Fifteen examples send conflicting directions.
- Mix in-category and out-of-category. If you're a hot sauce brand, pick 2 hot sauce brands and 2 brands from other categories whose web design you admire. The mix shows what's portable.
- Say specifically what you like. Not "I like the design." Say "I like that the homepage focuses on one product photo and one short paragraph — most sites in our category clutter the hero with 6 things."
What to leave out of a brief
- Design specifics. "I want a blue button in the hero" prescribes the solution. The designer's job is to find better solutions than what you'd specify. Stay at the requirement level: "We need to drive contact form submissions" not "We need a contact form button in blue."
- Lists of every feature you've ever seen on a website. Trim to what your business actually needs. Adding features always sounds free in the brief; it's never free in the build.
- Performance metrics from a vendor you don't yet trust. "Must achieve Lighthouse 100" is fine; "Must specifically achieve LCP under 1.2s on a Pixel 6 over Bell 3G" prescribes too much.
A free template
Download our 1-page brief template (Google Doc). Or just answer the six minimum-viable fields above in an email. Either works.
If you're considering Designer Digital for the project, our discovery interview will fill in the gaps the brief doesn't cover — but having the brief done up front means we can start with substance rather than basics.