The artwork came back wrong. Nine times out of ten the problem was in the brief, not the artist.
Our own artists work from briefs every day, and the difference between a piece that lands first time and one that goes three rounds is almost never talent. It is whether somebody wrote down what they actually wanted.
The same one-pager our artists work from. No email, no sign-up. Use it with any illustrator.
Download the checklist (PDF, one page)Start with the job, not the picture
The most useful opening line in a brief is not a description of the image. It is a description of what the image has to do. This will sit at the top of a landing page and has to make a tired procurement manager feel like we understand logistics. That tells an artist more than three paragraphs about composition, because it tells them what to optimise when a trade-off appears, and a trade-off always appears.
The nine things worth writing down
Where it will appear, at what size
A hero image, an app icon, a thirty-page book, a printed banner. Size and medium change the drawing, not just the export. Something designed to read at 48 pixels is a different picture from the same idea at A1.
The format and the shape
Landscape, portrait, square, and the actual dimensions if you know them. Cropping a finished illustration is how good work gets ruined.
Who is in it and what they are doing
Specific beats poetic. A warehouse supervisor in her fifties checking a tablet against a pallet is a brief. A sense of efficiency and trust is a mood board caption.
What must not appear
This is the most underused line in briefing. No stock-photo handshakes, no laptops, nobody smiling at the camera, no blue. Constraints save more rounds than instructions do.
Three references, each with a reason
Not five links. Three, each with one line saying what you want from it. This one for the colour, this one for the line weight, this one for how much empty space it leaves. References without reasons are a guessing game.
Where it sits next to other things
Send the page, the cover, the deck. An illustration that is beautiful alone and wrong beside your logo has failed, and the artist could not have known.
Text in the image, or none
If words are going in the picture, give the exact words now. Adding them later moves everything.
Who decides
One name. Briefs that come back through four opinions produce work that satisfies nobody, and the revision rounds get spent on internal disagreement rather than on the drawing.
When you need it, and what happens if it slips
A real date with a real reason. Artists plan their weeks around these, and a fake deadline used to create urgency gets found out and stops working.
Three things to agree before anybody starts
Where you are allowed to use it
Illustration is often licensed rather than sold outright, which means the price attaches to where it appears, for how long and in which countries. Agree this up front and in writing. Discovering at campaign launch that your licence was web-only is an expensive conversation. For what it is worth, our own work transfers to you in full once the balance clears, but do not assume that is standard, because it is not.
What you receive at the end
Layered source files or a flat image. A flat image cannot be recoloured, resized past a point or picked up by another artist later. If there is any chance of a series, insist on layers.
How many rounds, and what counts as one
Two rounds is a normal, fair number. Agree also what a round means. Change her jacket and move the whole composition are not the same request, and treating them as equivalent is how relationships sour.
Giving feedback that helps
Say what is wrong and why, not what to do instead. Her expression reads as worried and it should read as confident is useful. Make the mouth smaller is you doing the artist's job, badly. Collect all your feedback into one message rather than sending five as they occur to you, and mark clearly which points are must-change and which are preference. Artists can work with almost any honest note. What they cannot work with is make it pop.
Portfolio, rate card and contract terms in full, including who owns the artwork and from when.
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