The Ultimate Creative Brief Outline for Any Project
A well-written creative brief lays a solid foundation for your project and ensures that the entire team is laser-focused on finding the best possible solution. If you are not willing to lay the groundwork, ultimately the result will disappoint.
After many years working in agencies, I realized firsthand that bad creative briefs were holding me back from doing my best work.
This has led me to believe that good creative briefs can function as the one source of truth throughout the project lifecycle concerning goals, audience, specifications, and budget. Everyone involved, from in-house to agency, should be able to turn to the creative brief with any questions they may have. It’s important your creative brief has all the answers! Join me as I share my ultimate creative brief outline for any project. But first:
Why are creative briefs important?
Today’s projects typically involve multiple disciplines, each working on interdependent components. Requirements go across disciplines, but without a single source of truth, it is nearly impossible to get a complete overview of the project.
Setting up a social media campaign needs campaign guidelines from the client, layout from design, text from copywriters, and video from creative. Rebranding your client’s project asks for budgeting, goals, industry insights, as well as design by creative and website code from developers, maybe even PR by an outsourced agency.
By including all teams involved in the setup of your creative brief, there are no misunderstandings and everyone is working towards the same goal. And what’s even better: you’re more likely to avoid scope creep, dodge the endless revisions and end up with a successful outcome.
Whether you are a project manager scoping an application project or a lead-designer gathering creative needs for the next campaign, anyone dealing with projects and teams is better off with a well-crafted, centralized brief.
What’s tricky about most creative briefs?
I´ve seen all sorts of briefs, 3-word briefs, or 7-page documents. They are either not inspiring or share too much detail. I’ve seen creative briefs on post-it notes or even worse, simply some sentences scattered around a bunch of emails.
Therefore I believe it’s important to reject hollow or messy briefs and consider the tool you use to set up your own process of strategic brief writing. I encourage you to find the right brief-writing tool that keeps everyone aligned, works for any project, and cultivates collaboration. In my opinion, more often than not, creative briefs are:
Not adaptive to changes. As much as we’d wish for briefs to never change again once set up, reality shows us otherwise. The changing of requirements or changing of goals is unfortunately a reality! Make sure the tool you use to set up your brief is adaptive to the changes that occur during the project and that team members are correctly notified when this happens.
Not customizable. Project briefs for a website project or a social media campaign need inherently different ways of setting up. Instead of adding post-it notes or comments to each new brief, make sure you are using a briefing software that works as your up-to-date hub for all your project and client info.
Lack of interactivity. When working with interdependent teams on a project it’s important everyone has access to add their requirements and specifications or knowledge to the brief. The brief should be that one document all team members can refer to during the entire project lifecycle. A briefing tool that supports collaboration and interactivity is key.
Blank page fear. Setting up a brief from scratch without a template or pre-defined framework can be a daunting task. You’ll want to work with proven templates to standardize the way to start projects but are easily tailored to each project you take on.
Lack of credibility. To nail the kick-off of each project, it’s necessary each stakeholder including the client is signing off on the creative brief. Make sure your briefs can be easily customized to maintain brand consistency and thus reflect a professional approach.
At HolaBrief we made sure each project you take on has a fitting briefing template that can be customized with your branding details and has interactive sections that support collaboration and interactivity.
The ultimate creative brief outline
As I mentioned before, a well-written creative brief makes teams align faster on the problem to solve and smoothens the path to get there. Now finally, I’d love to break down for you the ultimate creative brief outline for any project:
1. Problem Statement
Here you should focus on more generic questions in order to get a general understanding of the project. Think of it as an ice breaker! More open questions that lead to deeper insights will come later on in the briefing process. This section should answer these 2 questions:
Why are we doing this?
What’s the problem the product/service is trying to solve?
2. Deliverables
This section is important to get a sense of the scope of the project and make sure everyone is aligned. If you require collaboration from several teams to get over the finish line, make sure each team lists down their deliverables as specific as possible.
Try listing things like brand strategy document PDF, brand guidelines PDF, stationary package in PSD and JPG format, website proposal PDF, etc.
3. Do’s & Don’ts
This is the section where everyone on the team gains clarity on what the expectations are. Even the craziest projects have some dos and don’ts.
The objective of this section is to avoid basic mistakes that are usually the result of miscommunication during the briefing phase. This is not about personal preferences, but about using the creative brief as a way to clarify those little details before they become big problems. Listing down dos and don’ts will help everyone involved to get a feeling of fears, objections, dreams, and ambitions.
4. Deadline
You can’t always sprint the whole way. Setting up milestones will help the team to find a productive and efficient pace for the project. This is probably the most self-explanatory section and also the most important one.
When setting up a deadline, be fair with everyone in the team and keep in mind that at this stage of the project deadlines are an estimation. They will depend on the number of revisions, the time it takes to get feedback and/or provide materials, etc.
5. Project Goals
The only way to avoid changing objectives or priorities is to do your work at the beginning of the project. Dig deeper and find the real problem your client is facing. Don’t just take their brief and roll with it. If they aren’t really sure what they really want, objectives will change around the clock.
During the kick-off, use a framework for goal setting, such as SMART goals and CLEAR goals but the essence is that your goals must be measurable and realistic. Having software that lists the priority of goals as well as how to measure them makes sure your goals are on point.
6. Target Audience or Personas
Personas are fictional characters based on real customer data. They allow the team to empathize, create and build better solutions and experiences and they are a key element for any creative brief.
By building personas based on consumer insights we can create nuanced and layered personalities that represent the broader target audience. By talking about actual ‘persons’ and not demographic statistics (‘40–50 years old males working in the tech industry’) we avoid generalization and stimulate ‘empathy’. I would advise creating anywhere between 2 to 4personas for your creative brief that represents different segments within the project scope.
In HolaBrief, quickly create different personas from predesigned options then tweak them to fit your needs. You might already have a user persona to work with. If so, simply attach the document to this section.
7. Tone of Voice
The tone of voice is the unique voice that fits a company’s culture and vision. It’s how the project looks and feels, it’s how it talks. It’s how a person answers the phone and how social media posts are written.
In order to maintain brand consistency, everyone included in the project — design teams or content creation — needs to have an overview of how messages should be communicated and how the design should look visually.
In HolaBrief’s Tone of Voice section, you can easily visualize the brand voice on a spider graph. There’s even a suggestions panel to help you get started.
8. Stakeholders
Within the agency different teams work together on the execution of the project. Therefore it’s important to know who of each team to talk to when questions arise. Marketing might need insights from design, or design needs to know about the video that is being created. Having a list of stakeholders ready for everyone to consult reduces the dreaded email load.
9. Project Specifics
Including project specifications right from the start, will help creative teams not only provide the right creative solution but one, that also fits the client’s budget, timeline, and most importantly, business goals.
When working on a big campaign, it’s here that specifications for the website, the application, or the print collateral have to be shared. Will the client provide imagery or copy? What print collateral needs to be worked on and should there be any special finishes? Which languages should the website be built in?
Building a website in one language does not have the same complexity as having additional languages. Not to mention the unexpected cost that might arise if a new language is added when the website is already being developed. Defining project specifics during the briefing helps to align all teams and avoid problems further down the line.
In HolaBrief you can choose to add a proven website specification section, an app specification section, a print specification section, or a content specification section to your creative brief template.
10. Budget
Anyone responsible for budgeting can add their estimations in this section of the brief. Defining the budgets for each team at this stage can of course be a rough estimate. Still, it’s important to know and to align all team members.
11. Assets
Are there any documents already created that can help each team to clear things up before starting the work: Examples of previous campaigns, brand guidelines, presentations, etc.
Make sure you use a briefing tool that enables you to upload and share all the information in one place and is available 24/7.
12. Share and Sign off
Once you’ve drafted the creative brief, share it with the team you’ll be working with when working at an agency. If you’re a consultant working outside of a client’s company, encourage your clients to share the brief internally. Does anyone have final comments? Make sure all stakeholders involved are signing off and aligned to start the creative work.
With HolaBrief you can easily create a shareable link of the creative brief for your team or client or download and save the brief as a PDF.
Creative Brief Template
In HolaBrief we make it easy (and fun!) to get everyone on the same page with a proven briefing template that can be customized to each project and client.
Deliver on time and on budget
Speed up the briefing process with proven templates to align on goals. Then, easily determine deliverables, set deadlines, and assign tasks so everyone is clear on the next steps.
Say goodbye to feedback loops
No more going round and round. Organize feedback so team members can review, comment, and easily reference as they go.
Less micromanaging, more creating
Keep everyone in the know with an up-to-date dashboard. This way everyone stays focused and — even better — inspired!
Try out HolaBrief for free.
