How to give your agency a good design brief

Do you sometimes find your marketing design tasks go over budget, or require a lot of revision cycles? You might be able to improve things with better use of design briefs. Here’s 5 things to consider when giving a design brief:

• Provide your brand guidelines: Your guidelines should demonstrate how you use your branding across various media, print, ads & web (etc). Don’t forget to share your font files with your designer so they have everything they need to ensure they meet your brand guidelines.
• Keep things consistent: If you’re briefing a piece of design work for a new advert/design, make sure you present any other ads that you have running, or the latest version of your ad that needs updating.
• Include design inspiration: And lots of it! Make sure to include a range of designs that you like and provide explanations around why you like them. If you’re briefing for web design, make sure to include references such as motion design, if you want to incorporate things like a parallax scroll to bring your site to life! 
• Say what you DON’T like!: This is just as important as telling your designer what you do like! Make sure you include specific examples and references so that your designer can ensure they steer clear of those design routes. 
• Specify where your designs will be shared: Will the designs be used only by internal resources who just have access to platforms such as Canva, or will they be shared with other agencies who have in-house design teams? This will help your designer understand what file types to provide when packaging up your design.