Stop 1 of 8 · Weekly
Brief to directions
Read the brief once, get a creative brief, the questions nobody answered, and three directions with a reason each, before you open Figma.
The half hour that decides the job
Yara gets briefs three ways. A Notion page from a returning client, a PDF from an agency, and a voice note from a founder who cannot write one. All three are missing the same things: who the audience actually is, what the design has to beat, and what counts as done. The old habit was to open Figma anyway and let the file argue back.
Now the brief goes in first. Claude reads the client brief, the brand guide and the last deck together, and gives back three things: a creative brief in the studio's format, the questions nobody answered, and three directions with a reason each. That is twenty minutes, before a single frame exists. Yara rejects directions freely. What she is buying is the argument written down, so the client meeting is about choices instead of taste.
What counts as a direction
A direction is not a mood. It is a claim about how the design will work, plus the evidence you would show to defend it.
| Part | What it says | Yara's fintech version |
|---|---|---|
| The claim | How this design earns attention | Boring on purpose, so it reads as a bank |
| The proof | What you show to defend it | Type scale, one accent, no illustration |
| The risk | What could sink it | The founder wants to look like a startup |
Three directions that differ only in colour are one direction. Ask for three claims that could not all be right.
Try this
You are working with a two-person design studio. I am attaching a client brief, the client's current brand guide and the deck we sent them last year. Write a creative brief in this order: audience, the job the design has to do, what it competes against, mandatories, constraints, what done looks like. Keep it to one page. Then list the questions the brief does not answer, ranked by how much the answer would change the design, with a one-line reason for each. Do not invent an answer to any of them.
Using the creative brief above, propose three creative directions that could not all be right at once. For each one give me a name, the claim it makes about how the design earns attention, the type and colour behaviour that follows from that claim, three reference points I could actually find, the risk that would sink it, and one sentence I can say out loud in the meeting. No mood adjectives on their own.
For each of the three directions, write a mood-board plan: six image slots with a specific description each, saying what the image has to prove, not what it looks like. Mark which slots I should shoot or generate rather than source, and which need a licence check. Put it in a table with the direction, the slot and the note.