How to brief a designer for your startup’s app: what founders should prepare

The brief is the cheapest part of a design project and the one with the most leverage. A clear one saves weeks of back-and-forth. A vague one means your designer spends the first phase guessing, and you spend the second explaining what you actually meant.

I’ve worked with a lot of founders on apps and products, most recently as Creative Director on Sculpt AI, a fitness app with more than 150 screens, and on a redesign of more than 100 screens for ChromaAI. This is what I wish every founder prepared before the first call. You don’t need all of it, but the more you have, the faster and better the result.

If you can’t say what the app does in one sentence, the design won’t be able to either. Sculpt’s mission was clear from day one: bring workout and food logging together in one seamless app, using AI to make the experience as simple and intuitive as possible. Every decision afterwards, from the brand to the smallest screen, could be checked against that sentence.

Write yours down. Then add one line on why it matters now, and what’s missing from the alternatives. For Sculpt, the fitness space looked saturated, but it was full of apps that barely scratched the surface.

Describe your users in practical terms, not just demographics:

• Who they are and what they’re trying to achieve.
• What they use today instead of your app, even if it’s a spreadsheet or three other apps.
• Where and when they’ll use it: in the gym between sets, at a desk, on the go.
• What frustrates them about the current options.

That last point is gold. It tells the designer what to fix first.

List the three to five things users must be able to do, in order of importance. For Sculpt, that included logging a workout, logging a meal and getting suggestions from the AI assistant. These journeys get designed first and set the patterns for everything else.

Then list the rest, including the boring flows: sign-up, onboarding, settings, editing a profile, empty states. That’s where screen counts grow, and where unplanned work hides.

Most projects don’t start from zero. Share everything, even the parts you’re not proud of:

• The current product: a test build, screenshots or a screen recording of every flow.
• Analytics or user feedback, if you have them: where people drop off, what they ask for.
• Brand assets: logo, colors, fonts, or a note that there aren’t any yet.
• Technical constraints: platform, framework, and any components or libraries the developers rely on.

With Sculpt, we completely reworked the previous version of the product and defined a new user flow. Knowing exactly what existed made that possible. With ChromaAI, an audit of every existing screen showed that ten tools felt like ten different products, and that finding shaped the whole redesign.

Say what you need now, and what you think you might need later:

• Brand identity: logo, colors, type and tone.
• Motion: logo animation, splash screen and interface motion.
• Product design: flows, screens and a component library.
• Website: a landing page or a full marketing site.
• Launch assets: app store screenshots, a launch video, social content.

Order matters. On Sculpt, we started with a modern, clean brand identity and motion design for the branding animation and splash visuals, and only then designed more than 150 UI screens. On ChromaAI, the work covered more than 100 screens, a motion system, the marketing site and a launch video. Both worked because the brand and the system came before the screens.

Share three to five apps or sites you like, and say why for each one: the onboarding, the typography, the way data is shown. Then share a few you don’t like. Knowing what to avoid is often more useful than knowing what to copy, and it stops the first round of designs from missing the mark.

Be upfront about dates and limits:

• Launch date, investor demo or any other fixed deadline.
• Platforms: iOS first, Android, web, or all three.
• Your development setup, and who will build the designs.
• A realistic budget range, so the scope can be shaped to fit. My post on what a brand identity costs explains what affects it.

Also expect iteration. Sculpt’s CEO has spoken about nearly two years of building and four complete redesigns, full rebuilds rather than tweaks, because the team refused to cut corners. Ambitious products change as you learn. A good brief makes those changes deliberate instead of chaotic.

Name the person who gives final approval, and who else needs to see the work. Agree on how feedback will be shared, ideally as one consolidated list per round rather than scattered messages, and how quickly you can respond. Projects slow down far more often because of unclear decisions than because of slow design.

You don’t need wireframes, a finished feature spec or perfect copy. You don’t need to know the colors or the fonts. Those are the designer’s job. What you need is clarity about the problem, the people and the priorities.

• The mission in one sentence, and why now.
• Target users, what they use today and what frustrates them.
• Three to five core journeys, in order of importance.
• The full list of other flows, including onboarding and settings.
• Everything that exists: product, screens, data, brand assets.
• Technical constraints and platforms.
• Scope: brand, motion, product, website, launch assets.
• References you like and dislike, with reasons.
• Deadlines and a budget range.
• Who approves, and how feedback works.

Want to see how this plays out on a real project? Read the ChromaAI case study or my SaaS redesign checklist.