The brief that makes a good logo, and the one that makes four mediocre ones

You can predict how a logo project will go from the brief, usually within the first paragraph. Not from how long it is — the ten-page ones are frequently the worst — but from whether anybody has made a decision before writing it.

The brief that works

Here is a real shape, paraphrased from a client who got a mark approved in one round: "We are a two-van pressure washing business in Tampa. Our customers are homeowners over fifty who are nervous about strangers on their property. Every competitor here looks like a monster truck rally. We want to look like the company your daughter would recommend."

Four sentences. It contains the market, the customer, the emotional job the mark has to do, and a position against the category. There is nothing in it about colours, fonts or shapes, and that is exactly why it works: it constrains the outcome without constraining the drawing.

The brief that does not

• "Modern, clean, professional." Every business in every sector wants these. They eliminate nothing, so the designer has to guess, and guessing produces breadth instead of depth.
• A list of logos you like with no reason attached. Useful only if you say what you like about each, because otherwise three different lessons can be drawn from the same three images.
• A committee with no named decider. Four stakeholders and no tiebreak is how a strong concept gets sanded into a safe one.
• A locked visual solution. "We want a globe with a swoosh" answers the drawing question before the positioning question, and the swoosh usually turns out to be the third-best idea.
• Nothing about where it has to work. A mark for a food truck and a mark for an app icon fail in opposite directions.

Three sentences that improve almost any brief

1. 1Say who your customer is and what they are worried about when they choose. Anxiety is the most useful design input there is.
2. 2Say what everyone else in your category looks like, and whether you want to belong to that or break from it. Both answers are legitimate, and they lead somewhere completely different.
3. 3Say who signs it off. Not to be bureaucratic — so the feedback that matters arrives before round three rather than after.

What you do not need to include

You do not need design vocabulary. Nobody here needs you to know what a counter or a ligature is, and briefs that reach for the terminology often end up describing a solution rather than a problem. Plain sentences about the business beat borrowed jargon every time.

You also do not need to be certain. "We cannot decide whether we want to look established or upstart" is a genuinely useful thing to say, because that is the actual decision and it is better argued in round one than discovered in round four.