Most people assume they need to have everything figured out before they can talk to a designer. They don’t. Here’s what actually helps, and why a good designer should be asking more questions than you are.
You don’t need a polished brief to start.
One of the most common reasons people put off working on their brand is the assumption that they need to arrive with something prepared. A brief. A clear vision. A well-articulated sense of what they want.
You don’t.
The businesses that work best with designers aren’t the ones that arrived with the clearest brief. They’re the ones that arrived with the most honest sense of where they are.
What actually helps
Before a first conversation, it’s useful to have thought about three things, not prepared formal answers, just sat with the questions:
- How do you want people to feel when they encounter your business? Not what you want them to think, what you want them to feel.
- Who are you trying to reach? Not a demographic, a person. The specific type of client you do your best work with.
- Is there a business or brand whose visual identity you’ve always admired? It doesn’t need to be in your industry. Just something that feels right in a way you can’t fully explain yet.
That’s it. Everything else is the designer’s job.
What a good designer does with that
A good designer takes those three things and asks questions until the picture gets clear. They surface the things you know but haven’t articulated. They push back on the things that don’t hold together. They help you understand what you actually want, which is usually different from what you thought you wanted at the start.
The brief gets written during the conversation, not before it.
If this resonates, we’d love to have a conversation.
No jargon. No pressure. hello@sparklabs.co.uk