AI / Design Communication & Image Prompting
A Brief for Your Designer
Translate 'I want it to feel premium' into executable requirements
I need to create [thing] and brief a designer, but I don't know design terminology. Write me a visual brief: 1) What this design is for and who it is for; 2) The feeling I want to convey (3 adjectives + concrete references); 3) Elements that must appear; 4) Elements that must never appear; 5) Deliverables list and sizes.
How to use
Attach a reference image or object to every adjective; 'premium' alone gives the designer nothing to check against.
Good for
- You do not have the design vocabulary but must hand the feeling you want to an outside designer or agency — three adjectives plus concrete references turn a feeling into something they can check against.
- One visual system has to be executed by several people (designer, editor, print vendor) — writing what must appear and what must never appear sets a shared floor and keeps each person from freelancing.
Not for
- You have not looked at enough references yourself — the 'reference' you write down tends to be one image grabbed at random, which leads the designer astray.
- What you actually need is execution (change the type size and spacing in this version) — a brief is for direction; pixels belong in a spacing handoff.
Example
Input
A tea brand's mini-app home page for 35-year-old customers; it should feel quiet and premium without feeling dated
What you get
States purpose and audience (checking the menu before arriving, mostly repeat customers) and pairs each adjective with a reference: quiet maps to the information density of a MUJI product page, premium to a single-color ground with generous negative space and material close-ups, not-dated to wide type-size contrast and no calligraphic faces. Must appear: real product photography, prices, store distance. Must never appear: promo starbursts, red-yellow clashes, pop-ups. Deliverables: home page 750×1624, share card 500×400, 12 icons.
Common mistakes
- Using only words like 'premium feel', 'design-y', or 'youthful' — the designer can only guess, and when the work comes back wrong you cannot say what is off.
- Turning 'must appear' into a 20-item feature list — the brief degrades into a functional doc and nobody owns the visual direction.
Try tweaking it like this
- Swap 'three adjectives' for 'one adjective plus one anti-reference (what I do not want it to become)' — boundaries outperform positive words and the first round hits far more often.
- Add a line for 'the one thing that cannot be compromised this time' — under tight resources the designer knows what to protect, and revisions stop sanding off the core feature.