A design brief is a questionnaire designers ask their clients to fill in. It may consist of five questions, or it may consist of twenty-five. Typically, designers make templates for different types of tasks. For example, a brief for a logo, a brief for corporate identity, a brief for a website, and so on. The brief contains the questions that seem important to the designer for the task.

For as long as I have been in the graphic design field, I often see designers complaining about clients. Designers scream about how bad clients are — they prepare terrible terms of reference, ask for whiter white, or, oh, the horror, send a logo in a Word document.