When I got into graphic design, I used to send new clients a questionnaire asking them about their organization and the project they were hiring me for.

Who are you? Who is this for? What are you trying to accomplish?

Now that I know better, I either work with them to write the brief, or I don’t work with them at all.

See, if you can get the most pretentious and the most self-centered people on the face of the earth—designers and marketers respectively—to agree about something, it’s that the work can be only as good as the brief, and that writing briefs is fucking hard.

But here’s the problem; You can never make a designer happy—94% of creative agencies in the US believe that their clients can’t write a decent brief—and you can never deflate a marketer’s ego—90% consider themselves pretty good at it.