Creative Brief Template
Define requirements, goals, and resources for creative projects to promote alignment with a Creative Brief. Get everyone on the same page and produce outstanding pieces.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Creative Brief template
Marketing and advertising campaigns are often massive, complex projects. There are a variety of stakeholders and moving parts, a budget that is stretched to its limit, and a complicated review process. If you succeed, you can win new customers and expand your business. If you don’t, you risk burning precious resources and undoing hard-won progress.
With so much at stake, it’s essential to get it right on the first try. That’s where the creative brief comes in, providing the relevant information for any creative project, including the target audience, goals, timeline, budget, and guidelines or specifications of the project itself.
What is a creative brief?
A creative brief is the foundation of any marketing or advertising campaign. Whenever someone requests a creative project, it’s important to include a creative brief that establishes guidelines for the project.
A creative brief helps build websites, videos, ads, banners, and much more. This document aims to anticipate any questions the creator might have about the project and confirm that everyone agrees on the scope and purpose before the creative work begins.
Most creative briefs are a maximum of two pages long. They are designed to outline the project's objective, establish direction, define the audience, and nail down the message. It states the communication strategy for the project's duration, timeline, budget, and scope.
When do you use a creative brief?
Prepare a creative brief before kicking off a project to ensure that all stakeholders are aligned and the creative team (designer, writer, videographer, etc.) has all the information they need before working. By using this Creative Brief template you can capture all the information needed for your campaign in one place. The template can easily be edited and shared with all stakeholders, keeping everyone on the same page.
Who should use a creative brief?
Design and advertisement agencies often use creative briefs to kickoff projects, but marketing departments, executives, or others professionals may use them to request creative work. Freelancers may also ask their clients to prepare a creative brief to streamline their collaboration.
What are the benefits of a creative brief?
Creative briefs clarify your goal and objectives. The brief ensures that everyone is aligned on what you are trying to accomplish. It increases efficiency and reduces the need for redundant meetings.
They also articulate facts and assumptions. It builds a foundation for your project, so your design team is on the same page as your marketing team, allowing space for all stakeholders to provide input.
They also provide metrics for success and criteria for evaluation. Your marketing and design teams can refer to the brief throughout the project lifecycle to ensure they’re on track to achieve their goals increase ownership and accountability.
The creative brief also allows the design team to uncover insights about the brand. The brief is an excellent way for the design team to be better acquainted with your company, brand voice, marketing style, and aesthetic. It creates opportunities for key conversations early in the project, saving you time and money down the line helping avoid scope creep.
And finally, it keeps all members of the team informed. The brief should lay out the budget, timeline, and preferred communication style, so everyone stays aligned.
What’s included in a creative brief?
Creative briefs may vary depending on the project, but here are a few basics that every creative brief should have: summary, content format, related projects, references, description, specs, deadline, goals, target audience, and content input.
Get started with this template right now.
Strategy Map Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Strategic Planning, Mapping
How do your individual or team goals relate to an organization’s overall strategy? A Strategy Map is a stylized picture of your organization’s strategy and objectives. It’s powerful because it provides a clear visual guide to how these various elements work together. Strategy Maps can help align various different team goals with the overall strategy and mission. With the Strategy Map in place, teams can create set actionable, relevant KPIs. Strategy mapping is often considered part of the balanced scorecard (BSC) methodology, which is a strategic planning tool for setting overall team goals.
User Journey Mapping Template
Works best for:
Design
Each person's life is a unique journey filled with daily decisions and challenges. The User Journey Mapping Template is a useful tool to visually represent these individual experiences. It simplifies understanding and documenting the current state of a situation by breaking down its different parts.
Online Sketching Template
Works best for:
UX Design, Desk Research, Design Thinking
Before you go full steam ahead with a promising idea, look at it from a high level — to know how it functions and how well it meets your goals. That’s what sketches do. This template gives you a powerful remote collaboration tool for the initial stages of prototyping, whether you’re sketching out web pages and mobile apps, designing logos, or planning events. Then you can easily share your sketch with your team, and save each stage of your sketch before changing it and building on it.
SCAMPER Model
Works best for:
Ideation, Operations, Brainstorming
Is your team in a rut? Have you had a lingering problem that can’t seem to be solved? First introduced in 1972, SCAMPER. is a brainstorming method developed by Bob Eberle, an author of creativity books for young people. This clever, easy-to-use method helps teams overcome creative roadblocks. SCAMPER walks you through seven questions that are meant to encourage your team to approach a problem through seven unique filters. By asking your team to think through a problem using this framework, you’ll unlock fresh, innovative ways to understand the problem you’re trying to solve.
Infographic Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Desk Research, Documentation
As we bet you’ve experienced, data can get pretty dense and dry. But you need it to be compelling, memorable, and understandable. The solution? Infographics. These are tools that let you present information in a visually striking way and turn quantitative or qualitative data into stories that engage and resonate. Whoever you’ll be presenting to — customers, donors, or your own internal teams — our template will let you design an infographic that combines text and visuals to break down even the most complicated data.
Empathy Map Canvas
Works best for:
Market Research, Research & Design
The Empathy Map Canvas is a versatile tool for visualizing user behavior and emotions. It helps teams capture insights about what users see, hear, think, and feel. Use this template to build empathy and ensure your product meets real user needs.