The most memorable brief I've ever received fit in three sentences. No benchmark, no mood board, no "I want something elegant but accessible". Just: a product, an audience, a promise. It was enough to create something right — perhaps precisely because it was just enough.
The myth of the exhaustive brief
Long briefs are often the sign of unfinished thinking. Slides pile up, Pinterest references, inspirational palettes, case studies of admired brands — as if the amount of information could make up for the lack of clear direction. It can't. It does the opposite.
The more contradictory references you stack, the more you dilute the creative direction. A brief that cites both Japanese restraint and the exuberance of a Parisian champagne house doesn't give two interesting leads — it gives zero. The creative who receives this document first has to do the clarifying work the client didn't do. That time is spent guessing rather than creating.
The length of a brief is inversely proportional to the clarity of the project. It's not an absolute law, but it's a reliable rule of thumb. When the project owner truly knows what they want — and above all why they want it — the words come quickly, and they are precise.
The three questions that matter
After years of collaborations in spirits, restaurants and hospitality, I've come to boil every brief down to three fundamental questions. The rest is commentary.
For whom? Not "everyone" or "whisky lovers aged 30 to 55". The ideal customer: their life, their trade-offs, what they're looking for that others don't give them. The more precise the target, the more liberating the direction.
Why now? The project's trigger. A launch, a rebrand, a range extension, entry into a new distribution channel. Understanding the "now" avoids producing something timeless when the urgency is tactical — or the other way round.
What won't we do? Limits are often more valuable than objectives. "We won't try to win over supermarkets." "We don't want vintage typography." "We won't reference geographical origins." These constraints draw a territory in negative — and the negative is sometimes the best starting point.
"A brief that says 'I don't know what I want yet, but I'll know it when I see it' isn't a brief — it's an invitation to improvise."
Trusting at the right moment
The brief sets the course. The rest belongs to the creative. That's where the real difficulty lies: not in writing the brief, but in knowing when to stop amending it once the work has begun.
It's tempting to keep clarifying, refining, adding one more constraint as the project moves forward. But every late amendment has a cost: it weakens the consistency of the creative process, and it sends an implicit signal — the trust isn't there yet.
Briefing well also means knowing when to let go. Set the course precisely, share the context honestly, then let the artistic direction do its job. The best results are always born in the space between constraint and freedom — never in exhaustiveness.
The postcard isn't a metaphor for lazy simplicity. It's a constraint of precision. When you only have ten lines, you keep what matters. And what matters is almost always enough.
