Brand identity brief template.

What a brief is for

A designer can only be as specific as the brief. Hand over “modern, bold, trustworthy” and you get back three polished directions that all look like the category, because nothing in the brief ruled anything out. Hand over who signs the contract, where the mark has to fit at 16 px and the colour support macros depend on, and the first round lands much closer.

The brief is also the thing you will hold the work against later. Section 2 says what has to be true after launch, section 11 turns that into tests. When a stakeholder dislikes direction two in week three, the conversation goes back to those lines instead of to whoever has the strongest opinion in the room.

The eleven sections

01 What we do, in one sentence

What customers buy from you today, for whom, and what changes for them. Write the sentence you use on a sales call, not the homepage headline and not the one you hope to say after the next raise. Add what people mistake you for, because that confusion is often the real brief.

Strong: “Contract review for in-house legal teams of five to fifty, so the team signs off routine NDAs in minutes instead of days. People think we are a law firm tool.”

Weak: “An AI-powered platform that transforms how modern teams work.” Every company in the category could sign that.

02 Why now

The event that started this: a launch, a raise, a rename, a product that moved, or two of your own pages that disagree about what you are. Then two or three things that have to be true after the identity ships. Those lines become the acceptance test, so make them observable.

Strong: “Series A closes in March. After the rebrand an enterprise buyer should not ask whether we are a side project, and the app icon should be the same mark as the favicon.”

Weak: “It feels like time for a refresh.” Nothing in that sentence can be checked when the work comes back.

03 Who has to believe it

Usually three people: the one who buys, the one who uses, and the one who signs. They meet the brand in different places, and a designer who knows that the signer first sees you in a procurement PDF will make different calls than one who only knows the homepage.

Strong: A three-row table: buyer, user, signer, and the first surface each one sees.

Weak: “Our audience is SMBs and enterprises globally.” That is a market, not a person.

04 The category, and where you sit in it

Three to five competitors with a line on what each brand says and what you say instead. Then describe what the whole category looks like, because the default is the thing to design away from. Screenshots help more than adjectives here.

Strong: “Everyone in legal tech uses navy, a serif, and a scale or a column. We sell speed, not gravitas.”

Weak: A list of competitor names with no view on any of them, which leaves the designer to guess where the gap is.

05 Personality, in pairs

Write each trait as “this, not that”, and make the “not that” a real temptation rather than a straw man. Two or three pairs are plenty. If a pair would not change a single design decision, cut it.

Strong: “Plain-spoken, not jokey. Precise, not cold.” Each half rules something out.

Weak: “Bold, innovative, human, trustworthy, fun.” Five adjectives every studio hears every week, none of which excludes anything.

06 What must survive

The name, a colour, anything customers already recognise, and the true non-negotiables with the name of the person who made them non-negotiable. Everything not on this list is open, and saying so out loud saves a round of work the designer would otherwise spend protecting things you never cared about.

Strong: “Name stays. The teal stays because support macros and the app icon use it. The mascot can go.”

Weak: Nothing written down, then a stakeholder vetoes direction two because the old colour was “part of who we are”.

07 Where the mark has to live

Tick every surface you will need in the next two years: browser tab, app icon, social avatar, product UI, partner tiles, deck, email, anything physical. Count the squares. That count decides whether you need a symbol at all, which is a bigger budget question than most founders expect.

Strong: Nine boxes, five ticked, two of them squares. The designer now knows a wordmark and a favicon may be enough.

Weak: “Website and social.” Then the app icon turns up two weeks before launch.

08 Constraints

Trademark and domain status, the existing product UI and how much of it stays, whether there is a dark mode, the accessibility floor, font licences you already own, and anything legal or regulatory. Constraints found in week four cost a direction; found in the brief, they cost a line.

Strong: “Name filed in the US, not the EU. Product has a dark mode. WCAG AA, 4.5:1 for body text. We own no font licences.”

Weak: Silence, followed by legal flagging the name the week the files are delivered.

09 References, with reasons

Brands you admire, each with what you like about it specifically and what you would drop. Then three to five things you have ruled out. Negative references narrow the search faster than positive ones, because a “no” is usually firmer than a “maybe like this”.

Strong: “Linear: how the wordmark holds at small sizes. Not the dark gradients. Ruled out: mascots, hand-drawn type, anything purple.”

Weak: A mood board of twenty logos with no notes. It records a feeling, and the designer has to reverse-engineer which part of it you meant.

10 How decisions get made

One name with the final say, the people consulted and on what, how many feedback rounds each phase gets, and how fast your side turns feedback around. Most identity projects that run late are not slow in the studio. They wait between decisions.

Strong: “CEO decides. Head of Product is consulted on in-app use only. Two rounds per phase, feedback within two working days.”

Weak: “The leadership team will review.” Five people, no tie-breaker, and a calendar that meets once a fortnight.

11 How you will judge it

Write tests you could check on delivery day. Legible at 16 px next to other tabs. Survives a circle crop, one colour and your darkest screen. Every surface from section 7 has a file or a template. Colours and type arrive as tokens, not a PDF. Add your own, but keep them checkable.

Strong: Six boxes anyone on the team can tick or not tick, without arguing about taste.

Weak: “We’ll know it when we see it.” You won’t, and neither will the four people you show it to.

Take the template

One Markdown file with brackets to replace and the tables already built. Filled in, it runs to about two pages. Paste it into Notion, Google Docs or an email, whatever the designer will actually open.

What to leave out

Each of these either answers the question the designer is being paid to answer, or makes the document longer without changing a decision.

• The answer. “A blue wordmark like Stripe’s” is a solution, not a brief. Describe the problem and the constraints; if blue is right, it will come back blue, with a reason.
• The full origin story. Two lines on why the company exists help. Two pages push the useful sections below the fold on the document the designer re-reads most.
• Procurement detail. Selection criteria, submission format and the payment schedule belong in the RFP you send before hiring. In the brief they bury the creative questions.
• Every stakeholder’s wish list. Collect them, then merge them into one view before the brief goes out. A brief that contradicts itself hands the designer your internal argument to settle.
• Deliverables you can’t name a use for. If nobody can say where the mascot or the sonic logo will appear, leave it out. It can be added the week the surface exists.

Who writes it

The founder, or whoever will have the final say on the identity. Not marketing on the founder’s behalf, and not the designer: a brief the studio writes for you records what they heard on the call, which is useful, but it is a summary of your view rather than your view. One person writes the first draft in one sitting. The people in section 10 read it and argue before it goes out, not after.

Short answers are fine. A section you cannot fill in honestly is worth leaving visibly empty: an empty section 4 tells the designer the competitive picture is part of the job, which is far more useful than a confident guess. If more than three sections are empty, the work you need first is probably strategy rather than identity, and the brand audit checklist is a quick way to find out.

Here, the first week of a brand identity engagement is spent turning this brief into decisions. Arriving with it filled in moves that week forward. The section on surfaces gets its own treatment in wordmark or symbol, and the list of what you should get back at the end is canonical in the SaaS brand kit.

Frequently asked