What a brief should actually contain

The contact page on this site is a form with seven fields, and people sometimes tell us it feels like a lot for a first message. It is a lot. It is also the reason our first calls are useful. A brief is not a formality we get through before the real work; it is the first piece of real work.

Name, company and email are obvious. The fourth field asks what you need, as a set of chips rather than a text box, because most people know they need something but not what it is called. Ticking Identity and Web together tells us more than a paragraph would, and it tells us honestly.

The budget field is a range, not a number, and it is required. We know this is the one people hesitate over. The rates are public, so the range is not a negotiation — it is a way of telling us which of our four services fits, and whether the timeline you have in mind is possible at all.

The timing field matters more than people expect. A cidery launching for harvest and a bistro opening in spring are different projects even if the deliverables match, because the season decides which parts of the system are needed first. Tell us the date the work has to exist by, not the date you would like to start.

The last field is the brief itself, and the placeholder text is our favorite example: a cidery going national needs a label people can read across a store. One sentence, a business, a problem, a place. If you can write that sentence, we can price the project from it. If you cannot yet, write the three things that are bothering you and we will find the sentence together on the call.

What we do not need: a mood board, a list of studios you admire, or a competitor’s site with instructions to make ours look like it. We will ask about references in week one, after we understand the business. The brief is for the business.