How to Brief a Design Agency: The One-Page Brief

Note

Design brief: a short document, written by the client, that describes the problem a design project must solve, the people it serves, the constraints and the decision to be made. It describes the problem, not the solution.

A brief is not a specification. "A homepage with a carousel of three images and a blue button" is a solution, and it removes the one thing you are paying an agency for: the judgement about what will work. "Patients cannot tell which of our two clinics offers physiotherapy, so they call the wrong one" is a problem. It gives the agency something to solve.

A brief is also not a statement of work. The brief is your side. The agency's reply, with deliverables, timeline, price and responsibilities, is the scope, and that is what goes into the contract.

Because it makes quotes comparable. When three agencies each get a different phone conversation, they quote three different projects, and the cheapest one is often simply the smallest. A single page sent unchanged to everyone fixes that.

It also starts the work in the right place. The GOV.UK Service Manual says to "always start by learning about the people who will use it", because if you do not understand who they are or what they need, "you cannot build the right thing." A brief that names the people and their task gives the agency that starting point before the first call.

Copy this and fill in each line. One or two sentences per field is enough.

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Attach the evidence rather than summarising it: an analytics export, a list of the five questions customers ask most, examples of sites or decks you like and dislike with one line on why.

Illustration only, not a real client. The brief below is invented for this guide. The clinic is imaginary and unnamed, and every detail is made up; it does not describe any real practice.

1. The business: physiotherapy clinic with two locations in one Ontario city, serving adults with sports and workplace injuries.
2. The problem: patients book at the wrong location and call to ask which clinician does what; the site does not say.
3. The people: new patients on a phone, usually after a referral; returning patients rebooking.
4. Success: fewer misdirected bookings and fewer phone calls asking basic questions.
5. Scope: a new site of around eight pages, with one page per location and per clinician; not in scope: the booking system itself.
6. What exists: current site, logo files, staff photos, Google Business Profiles for both locations, analytics access.
7. Constraints: booking stays in our existing system; first-contact forms must not ask for health details.
8. Budget: a range, plus HST, for the build; ongoing care to be quoted separately.
9. Dates: live before January, when new-year bookings rise.
10. Decision: the clinic director approves; the front-desk lead reviews content.

Field 7 is the kind of line that saves weeks. Our Ontario Practice Website Index, a convenience sample of Ontario law, clinic and accounting homepages (edition 2, October 2026, n = 187), found 13 of 139 first-contact forms asking for health or case details before anyone had spoken to the client. Writing the rule into the brief means nobody designs that form in the first place. Our PHIPA forms guide explains why.

Three things, more than any others.

A budget range. Without one, every quote is a guess about what you can afford. With one, each agency tells you what it would do for that money.

Your existing pages that bring in traffic. If the project replaces a website, the agency needs to know which URLs matter before it plans the new structure, so each old URL can be mapped to a new one. Our redesign guide explains why.

The person who talks to customers. The receptionist, the sales lead, the support inbox. They are the first people a good agency will want to interview; put their name in field 10.

• The design. Colours you like belong in the attachments as examples, not as instructions.
• Every feature you can imagine. List what the first version must do; mark the rest as later.
• Confidential customer data. An agency does not need real patient or client records to quote. Send counts and patterns instead.

Expect questions. An agency that quotes a one-page brief without asking anything is guessing. After a call, ours replies with a written scope and one fixed quote, agreed before any work starts; for a website, the free Redline comes first, so you see how we read your current site before you see a price. Our guide to what a UX agency does in week one shows what should happen once you say yes.