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What A Good Creative Brief Gives An AI Tool That A Vague One Never Will
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
"Make something eye-catching" produces something generic, reliably, because
there's nothing in the request an AI tool can actually anchor to. This isn't
a limitation specific to AI — a human designer given the same vague brief
would produce something equally unmoored. The fix is the same one that's
always worked for creative work: a real brief.
The rule: a creative brief needs a reference, an audience, and a
constraint — without at least one of the three, "make it good" has no
target to aim at, human or AI.
The mechanism
- Give a real reference, not a description. An actual image, a
competitor's piece, an example of a style you like — something concrete
to anchor to, rather than adjectives like "modern" or "bold" that mean
different things to everyone.
- Name the actual audience. Not "everyone" — the specific person this
needs to land with, and what they already expect or respond to.
- State one hard constraint. A size, a colour that must appear, a
competitor's look to specifically avoid. A constraint gives the work
somewhere to push against.
- Say what "wrong" looks like, if you can. Sometimes it's faster to
rule out a direction than to describe the right one from scratch.
What to skip
Skip briefs that are entirely adjectives — "clean, modern, professional,
but also warm and approachable" describes a feeling, not a direction, and
produces the same safe, generic result every time. And skip skipping the
brief step entirely because a quick result is easy to generate — a fast,
generic result is still generic.
Guardrails
- A strong brief improves the odds of a usable first pass; it doesn't
replace the iteration that follows. Expect to refine, not to nail it in
one shot.
- If you're producing this for a client, get their reference and their
audience directly rather than guessing at what they meant by "modern" —
the ambiguity in a vague brief usually traces back to an ambiguous
conversation, not to the tool.
- Using someone else's specific work as a reference is different from
copying it outright — reference for direction and feel, not for lifting
someone's actual creative work wholesale.
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