The quiet problem with logos that try to say everything

We've received briefs that ran to fourteen pages. We've received briefs that were three bullet points on a napkin photograph sent via WhatsApp. The fourteen-page briefs were almost always harder to work from.

This isn't because long briefs contain too much information. It's because they contain the wrong kind of information — and the volume obscures that. A brief that runs long has usually been written to demonstrate effort rather than to communicate intent. Every additional paragraph is the client hedging, covering ground they're not sure we need, or describing the solution instead of the problem. By the time we reach the actual brief — the thing they actually need — it's buried in pages three through seven under sections titled "Background" and "Market Context" and "Key Messaging Territories."

The brief as a diagnostic tool

We've started treating brief length as a signal about the project itself. A client who can describe what they need in four sentences has usually thought harder about what they need than a client who needs twelve paragraphs to get there. The compression required to write something short forces the kind of clarity that most briefs are trying to avoid.

This isn't about clients being lazy or studios being precious. It's about what happens when a problem hasn't been fully understood yet. Vague problems produce long briefs because the client fills the space with everything that might be relevant, hoping the studio will sort it out. The studio then designs to the length of the brief rather than the clarity of it — and the result is work that addresses everything and resolves nothing.

What a good brief actually contains

After eight years and more briefs than we can count, here's what a useful one has:

The situation — not the history, but the specific moment that made this project necessary right now. What changed? What's at stake? What would happen if nothing were done?

The audience — one specific person, not a demographic. Not "18 to 35 year olds with an interest in design." The actual human being who needs to respond to this work, described in a way that would let us pick them out of a crowd.

The single most important outcome — not a list of objectives, not KPIs, not "strengthen brand awareness whilst driving conversion." One thing. If it works, what does that look like?

The constraints — budget, timeline, and the non-negotiables that aren't negotiable. The constraints aren't obstacles to the work; they're part of the brief. The best design happens inside real limits.

Everything else is context. Context is useful but it's not the brief. The brief is what we come back to when we're making a decision at eleven o'clock on a Thursday and we need to know which direction to go.

Our job at the brief stage

We've learned to treat our first session with a new client not as a briefing but as a brief-writing workshop. We come with questions, not with a form to fill in. We leave with a document we wrote together — usually one page, occasionally two — that both parties sign off on before design begins.

The brief is a contract between us: this is what the project is for, this is what success looks like, this is the line we won't cross. When the work gets difficult — and it always does — the brief is what we come back to. A bad brief means that conversation happens with nothing to reference. A good brief means it happens fast.

The thing nobody says about briefs

The most important function of a good brief is what it prevents, not what it enables. A clear, short, honest brief prevents the studio from solving the wrong problem. It prevents the client from changing the scope mid-project because the original objective was never properly stated. It prevents the ten-week project from becoming a sixteen-week one.

In our experience, every project that went wrong could trace its problems back to a moment in the brief where something was left vague, and both parties tacitly agreed to leave it that way. The vagueness felt like flexibility at the time. It never was.