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Skill · Creative brief

Creative brief.

Turn a vague idea into something a team can build.

A brief that bridges discovery and execution. It translates 'we want a website' into ten tight sections a designer, developer, or agent can act on: snapshot, audience, objectives, key message, voice, visual direction, scope, constraints, inspiration, and approval. A good brief is two pages, not ten.

When the inputs are thin, the skill runs a short intake to fill the gaps before writing, and stress-tests the draft against the patterns that produce briefs nobody can use.

Audience: founders, marketers, designers, and anyone kicking off a project, a redesign, or a handoff to a designer, developer, or AI agent.

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The framework

Ten sections. Each one tight.

The brief outputs ten sections. Keep each short; a brief that tries to be everything ends up read by no one.

  1. 01Snapshot: what, who, why, and when in one paragraph, the kind of thing you would say at a kickoff in thirty seconds.
  2. 02Audience: the primary audience first, what they are trying to do, what blocks them today, and where you reach them.
  3. 03Objectives: what success looks like, with a measurable signal paired to every objective.
  4. 04Key message: the one thing a visitor should walk away knowing, in one sentence.
  5. 05Voice and tone: three to five adjectives, each paired with what you are not.
  6. 06Visual direction: mood, palette, type, and imagery, with three to five reference URLs worth more than 500 words.
  7. 07Scope and deliverables: a specific list of what is being made, named down to the components.
  8. 08Constraints: time, budget, technical, brand, and the accessibility level required.
  9. 09Inspiration and competitors: sites to feel like and sites to feel different from, with the reason for each.
  10. 10Approval: who signs off, what artifact triggers sign-off, and what happens if no one does by the deadline.

How the skill runs

From the conversation to a delivered brief.

The skill reads what is already known, fills only the real gaps, and stress-tests before handing anything over.

  1. 01

    Read the conversation

    Pull every fact already given. Do not ask questions the context already answers.

  2. 02

    Identify gaps

    Of the ten required inputs, mark which are missing or thin. Fewer than five answers means an intake comes first.

  3. 03

    Run intake

    Ask three to five targeted questions, grouped to keep the conversation tight. Fill the actual gaps, not a generic questionnaire.

  4. 04

    Draft the brief

    Write the ten sections from the template, kept under 1500 words.

  5. 05

    Stress-test

    Check the draft against the failure patterns: a copied giant brand, an 18-to-65 audience, awareness with no metric, 'modern and clean' with no reference.

  6. 06

    Deliver

    Save as creative-brief.md, and offer a shareable Word or PDF version for stakeholders.

  7. 07

    Hand off for aesthetic depth

    When voice and visual direction need more rigor, run creative-direction next for the structured four-axis brief.

Reference files

Three references that go alongside the SKILL.md.

  • references/creative-brief-template.md

    The fillable template. Copy it and use it as the starting structure for the ten sections.

  • references/voice-and-tone-guide.md

    Voice frameworks, brand archetypes, and worked patterns for the voice-and-tone section when the user has not already specified a voice.

  • references/example-brief.md

    A worked example for a fictional B2B SaaS, showing how filled-out a good brief actually looks.

Browse all reference files on GitHub

Bridges to other skills

What comes before, and what the brief points to.

The brief sits between discovery and execution. These are the skills on either side of it.

  • Comes first

    brand-discovery

    Runs before the brief when the audience and category are still unknown. The brief assumes those answers exist; discovery is where they come from.

  • Aesthetic depth

    creative-direction

    For projects where voice and visual direction need more rigor than a brief surfaces, this produces the structured four-axis aesthetic brief that content and art-direction skills consume.

  • Engineering format

    pm-spec-writing

    When the deliverable is a PRD or a dev ticket rather than a creative brief, this is the format to reach for. It speaks to engineering rather than to designers and the wider team.

  • Writes the words

    content-and-copy

    Produces the actual copy. A brief points the writing in a direction; it does not write the page itself.

  • In-the-weeds calls

    design-standards

    Answers the one-off design question a brief does not: a contrast ratio, a spacing value, a button standard.

Open source under MIT

Read the SKILL.md on GitHub.

The skill source lives in the rampstackco/claude-skills repository alongside dozens of other skills covering the full lifecycle of brand and product work. This page is a structured overview; the SKILL.md is the source. MIT licensed.

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Frequently asked questions.

How long should a creative brief be?
Two pages, not ten. Keep each of the ten sections tight and the whole brief under 1500 words. If the project is large, keep the main brief short and move detail into linked appendices (audience research, brand guidelines). Briefs that try to be everything end up read by no one.
What if the client only gives me a vague idea?
Run a short intake before writing. If you have answers to fewer than five of the ten required questions, ask three to five targeted questions grouped to keep the conversation tight, and fill only the real gaps. Do not write a generic brief on top of a vague answer like 'I want a website for my coffee shop'; ask who the single most likely visitor is, what one action matters most, and which three sites they think look right.
What are the ten things a brief has to answer?
What the project is, why it exists and what problem it solves, who the audience is, what you want them to do or feel or know, the personality and how it sounds, the visual direction and how it looks, what is in scope and what is out, the constraints (time, budget, technical, brand), what success looks like, and who approves. Confirm you have answers to these, or can elicit them, before writing.
When should I push back instead of writing the brief?
When the input matches a known failure pattern. 'We want to be the [giant brand] of our niche' needs narrowing to the one or two things they actually want to borrow. An audience of 'men and women 18 to 65' is not an audience; ask for the single most valuable customer type. 'Increase awareness' with no metric needs a number. 'Modern, clean, minimalist' is meaningless; ask for three specific URLs. Twenty pages of context with no clear ask needs one paragraph a designer could read alone.
How does this relate to creative-direction?
The creative brief is the general project brief that aligns a team before work starts. Creative-direction is the optional next step for projects where the voice and visual sections need more rigor: it produces a structured aesthetic brief across four axes (tone register, aesthetic philosophy, audience relationship, sensory ambition) that content, copy, and art-direction skills consume directly. Write the brief first; run creative-direction when the aesthetic needs depth.