The Brand Brief: Before You Open Canva

Before you spend another evening in Canva, decide what the brand has to do. One page that tells a designer, or you, exactly what good looks like.

A four-page fillable PDF, and the brief itself is one page of it.

Most briefs are written by addition. Everyone who will have an opinion later puts their requirement in now, the document swells, and what gets sent grants permission to do almost anything. A brief that forbids nothing has decided nothing, and the decisions it avoided resurface at the presentation, as taste, which is the most expensive place to have them.

This is the instrument that ends that. Six fields, each one binding. A rejection list. A judging test written before you have seen any work.

WHAT'S INSIDE

The six fields — what must be true, for whom, the binding constraint, the buildable constraint, already rejected, the test. Each one with the trap underneath it.

The rejection list — three solutions named and refused in writing. It is uncomfortable and it is the most useful paragraph in any brief.

The six tests — rejection, elimination, failability, the adjective count, the stranger test, one page. Premium and human cannot be failed, which is why they survive every draft.

A worked example — one finished brief and a note on what it rules out on purpose so that the work can finish.

Instrument No. 03 of The Assignment, published Monday 12 October 2026. A new task every Monday.

Who made this

I started Sweet Peanut, a Vancouver baby-clothes company, in 2006, grew it into more than 1,500 stores, including Harrods and Nordstrom, across four continents, and sold it. Before that I spent ten years in advertising at BBDO, Cossette and McCann, finishing as VP and General Manager of McCann Vancouver. Since then I've run my own consultancy, taught business school for sixteen years, and written marketing textbooks for Pearson.

Education, not legal, tax or financial advice. For your own business; please don't share or resell. If you coach or teach and want a licence, email me.