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What should a creative brief include?
- The objective. What should this change? One sentence.
- The audience, described in their words, not yours.
- The message: the one thing they should take away.
- The limits: format, sizes, brand rules, budget, deadline.
- References: examples of what good looks like.
- The test: how you’ll judge the result, decided before you see it.
Most briefs describe the screen or the asset. The useful ones also describe what happens around it.
The thirty minutes before the brief
When I trained designers at PepsiCo on bringing AI into their creative process, we added a step before anyone opened Figma.
When a new design request landed, they filled in a one-page worksheet. At its centre was a five-box map:
- Before: what comes in, and from where.
- After: what action follows, and who picks it up next.
- The want: what the person is actually trying to do, in their words.
- People: who collaborates, approves or needs to see it.
- The screen: only then, the thing the request describes.
One habit from that session I use everywhere: rename the request in your head. The name smuggles in a design.
A “homepage” pulls you toward scanning. A “workspace” pulls you toward acting. Same pixels, different brief.
The last step on the worksheet was to save it in the project folder. From then on, it’s context for every AI question you ask about that project.
How do you write a creative brief for AI?
Like a brief for a person, with two changes.
Never show it what you don’t want. AI copies examples, warnings included.
On my own accounts, a bracketed note in the slide instructions, “NO link en la bio”, ended up printed on the last slide of posts on six accounts.
The tool read the warning as content.
Turn taste into numbers. My direction for slideshow text was “no serif, no bold, the aesthetics of viral ones that are actually cool.” A designer would get that.
The tool needed default sans, white text, a 16px hook, 14px body, centred, 80% width and a 30% overlay. Then look at the first five before anything goes out.
How long should a creative brief be?
One page covers most work. If the objective needs more than a sentence, the thinking isn’t finished yet.
For AI, precision beats length: a short brief with one real example does more than a long one full of adjectives.
When a brief matters most
When someone else does the making: a freelancer, a team or a tool. It matters less when you’re sketching alone, because the sketch is the brief.
Even then, write the one-sentence objective. It’s the line you’ll defend the work with later.
Next: a brief is context, and context engineering is how you keep it in front of an AI tool. For teams, see AI training for creative teams.