Why Your Design Isn’t the Problem (Your Briefing Process Is)
Most marketing teams that come to us think they have a design problem. Work is coming back wrong. Revisions are piling up. Deadlines are slipping. The designer (agency, freelancer, whoever) keeps missing the mark.
But nine times out of ten, when we dig into it, the design is fine. The brief is the problem.
This isn’t a knock on marketers. Briefing is a skill that nobody teaches you, and most of the resources out there are either written for agencies (who want everything in a 12-page document before they start) or so vague they’re useless. So here’s a practical look at where briefs actually fall apart, and what to do about it.
The three things that kill a brief before it starts
1. You describe the deliverable instead of the goal.
“We need a banner ad” is not a brief. It’s an output. Why do you need the banner ad? What should someone feel, think, or do after seeing it? What’s the single message it needs to land? Without answers to those questions, a designer is just guessing, and they’ll guess wrong.
2. You share references without context.
References are useful. References without explanation are chaos. “Something like this” followed by a Pinterest board of 40 images spanning three different design styles and four different colour palettes is genuinely worse than no reference at all. Tell the designer what you like about the reference. Is it the layout? The colour? The energy? The typography? One good annotated reference beats twenty unlabelled ones every time.
3. You give feedback on the wrong thing.
“I’m not sure it’s right” is a feeling, not feedback. Designers can’t work with feelings. If something isn’t landing, try to identify where. Is it the hierarchy? The colours feel off-brand? The headline isn’t prominent enough? Even getting to “I think the problem is in the top half of the design” is more useful than a vague sense of unease.
What a good brief actually looks like
You don’t need a template. You need answers to five questions:
- What is this, and where does it live? (Channel, format, size)
- Who is going to see it? (Be specific. “Our target audience” is not an answer.)
- What do we want them to do or feel?
- What is the one thing this needs to communicate? (One. Not four.)
- What’s the deadline, and is it real or notional?
Everything else is supporting detail. Useful, but optional.
The fastest way to improve your design output
Brief verbally first. A two minute conversation before the work starts is worth an hour of revision cycles after it. Talk through what you’re trying to achieve, what success looks like, and what you’re worried about. Then let the designer ask questions. You’ll be surprised how much clarity comes out of that conversation, and how little you actually need to put in writing afterwards.
The best design relationships we see are the ones where the marketing team treats their designer like a thinking partner, not a production resource. Brief them well, give them the context they need, and then get out of the way. That’s when the work gets genuinely good.
Quarterly is an embedded design studio. If your team is producing a lot of creative output and struggling with consistency, turnaround times, or just the sheer volume of requests, we might be worth a conversation. See how it works.
