Nobody is going to hand you a real brief

What you will actually be given

You will be given a sentence. "We need a poster for the launch." "Something for Instagram, modern, make it pop." "A logo — you know, professional but friendly."

None of that is a brief. It is a request for an object. A brief tells you what the object has to do. The gap between the two is where most unpaid revision rounds live: you make the thing that was asked for, the client says it is not right, and neither of you can say why, because nobody ever wrote down what right meant.

Extracting the brief is a skill, it takes about fifteen minutes, and it is the single highest-paid quarter hour in the job.

The seven questions

Ask these out loud, in a call or in person if you can, and write the answers down where the client can see them.

1. 1Who exactly sees this? Push past "everyone aged 18 to 45". Push until you get a person: "shop owners on this road who already know us but think we are expensive."
2. 2What do they currently believe? This is the question people skip and it is the most useful one. You are not writing on a blank surface. You are editing something already in their head.
3. 3What should they believe or do afterwards? One thing. If you are given four, ask which one they would keep if the other three were deleted.
4. 4Where will they see it? On a phone at a bus stop. Printed A5 and handed over at a counter. Projected in a hall. This determines size, contrast, and how many words are possible, and it is often the answer that kills the client's original idea.
5. 5How will you know it worked? Phone calls, walk-ins, sign-ups, a full room. Even an unmeasurable answer is useful, because it exposes disagreement between two people on the client's side who thought they agreed.
6. 6What must not change? Legal text, a registered mark, a colour the founder will not give up, a photograph of a person who has given permission for that photograph and no other.
7. 7Who signs it off, and when? If the answer is "the team", find out whether one person can say yes. A piece that needs four yeses is a different job and should be priced as one.

Add money and rounds to the same document. "Two rounds of revision included, further rounds charged at X" prevents a specific argument, and it prevents it in writing.

Write it back

Send the answers back in your own words, in a shared document, and ask them to confirm. This is not bureaucracy. It converts a vague conversation into a thing you can point at three weeks later when someone says they wanted it blue.

A brief that fits on one screen:

FOR:      Shop owners on Kandivali market road, 30-55,
          who know us but assume we are expensive.
NOW:      They think a service contract costs 8,000 a year.
AFTER:    They think it starts at 2,400, and they call.
WHERE:    A5 handed over the counter. Also one 4:5 post.
SUCCESS:  Twenty calls in three weeks.
FIXED:    Logo, the phone number, the GST line.
SIGN-OFF: Priya only. Draft Thursday, final next Wednesday.
ROUNDS:   Two included.

When the client genuinely does not know

Sometimes there is no hidden brief to extract. The client has not thought about it, and interrogating them harder makes them defensive and makes you look like an obstacle. When you hit that, stop asking and start proposing.

Show two directions — not two layouts, two *premises*. Write one sentence above each: "Direction A says we are the cheapest. Direction B says we are the ones who turn up." Keep them visually rough so nobody argues about the shade of green. People are far better at reacting than at specifying, and a wrong direction rejected in five minutes has taught you more than an hour of questions.

The honest limitation: this only works if the two directions are genuinely different. Two versions of the same idea with different corner radii teach you nothing, and clients can feel when they are being offered a fake choice.

Briefing yourself

Personal work needs this more, not less, because there is nobody to argue with. The questions change slightly: who is this for, what do they already assume, what is the one thing I want to be different, and how will I know I got there. Written down, in a file, before you start.

You will fail this test constantly. Everyone does. But an unfinished personal project usually died because there was no way to tell whether it was finished, and a sentence written at the start is how you tell.

Do this today

Take a job you are working on now, even a small one, and answer the seven questions in a plain text file. Where you cannot answer, write "unknown" instead of guessing — then send those specific unknowns to the client as questions. Three unknowns sent on day one costs you one email. Three unknowns discovered on day nine costs you the weekend.