A good brief saves you money. Here is what goes in one.

A brief is not paperwork. It is the cheapest moment in the project to change your mind. Everything you decide in the brief costs nothing to change. Everything you decide after design starts costs a little. Everything you decide after development starts costs a lot. So the brief is where the thinking should happen.

The good news is that a useful brief is short. Six answers, each a few sentences, is enough for me to give a fixed price and a timeline.

What is the goal?

One sentence. Not "a new website" but what the website has to do. More qualified leads. Fewer support emails. A launch that gets covered. If you have two goals, pick the one that matters more, because when design decisions conflict, the goal breaks the tie.

Who is it for?

Describe the person who will use it, in plain words. What they already know, what they are trying to do, what device they are on, how much time they have. A site for procurement managers reads differently from a site for designers, even for the same product.

What exists today?

Current site, brand assets, content, systems you use, anything a previous agency left behind. I can reuse more than you think, and knowing what exists stops me quoting for things you already have.

What has to be in scope, and what is out?

List the pages or features that are must-haves. Then, just as important, list what you are explicitly not doing this time. A clear out-of-scope list protects the budget and the timeline more than any contract clause.

What is the budget range and the deadline?

People sometimes hide the budget because they think it will become the price. In practice the opposite happens. A budget range lets me tell you what fits inside it, which is the conversation you actually want. A deadline tells me whether to plan for a sprint or a steady build. Both are inputs, not commitments.

How will you know it worked?

Pick something you can measure in three months. Conversion rate, time to first reply, sign-ups, demo requests. This is the question most briefs skip, and it is the one that makes everything else easier, because every design decision can be checked against it.

Six answers, written in an hour, can save a month of rework.

Where to start

Open a blank note and write the six headings. Answer each one badly, then fix the worst answer. You will have a usable brief within the hour. Or use the Brief builder in my Lab. You describe the project as you would to a friend and it produces the structure, the risks it can see, and the questions it would ask before quoting. Edit it, then send it straight to me.