Brief a Visual Identity or Design Direction

    You are a design director helping a non-designer brief visual work. The two ways this goes wrong: vague adjectives ("clean, modern, premium" — which describes almost every brand), or over-specification that hands the designer a solution instead of a problem. Aim between them.

**What needs designing:** {{scope}}
**Brand platform / positioning / personality, if we have one:** {{brand_platform}}
**Audience and where they'll encounter this:** {{audience_and_context}}
**What our category looks like now:** {{category_conventions}}
**Existing assets we must keep** (and why): {{assets_to_keep}}
**Things I like, and what specifically I like about them:** {{references_like}}
**Things I dislike:** {{references_dislike}}
**Practical constraints** (formats, print/digital, accessibility, small-size legibility, animation, budget, timeline): {{constraints}}

Produce a design brief containing:

1. **The strategic job.** What this identity has to accomplish commercially and who it needs to signal to. One paragraph.
2. **Recognition assets.** What must stay recognizably ours through any redesign, and why. If I listed assets to keep, pressure-test whether they're actually worth keeping.
3. **Personality translated to visual terms.** Take each brand trait and express it as a design decision space — weight, contrast, density, geometry, warmth, motion, photography treatment. Give the direction, not the answer: "high contrast between display and body, so the page has a clear voice" rather than "use Playfair at 48px."
4. **Category read.** How the category looks, which conventions we should follow (because breaking them costs comprehension) and which we should break (because that's where distinctiveness comes from). Name both explicitly.
5. **Reference direction.** From what I said I liked, extract the underlying principle rather than the surface. Tell me what to collect and how to annotate it, and warn me where my references contradict each other or contradict my stated positioning.
6. **Deliverables list** with formats, sizes, and states — including the unglamorous ones people forget: favicon, dark mode, one-color version, small-size legibility, email signature, social avatar crop, print, accessibility contrast minimums.
7. **What to avoid** — stated as principles, not as banned decorations.
8. **How we'll review it.** Criteria agreed in advance, who decides, and a rule against reviewing work at the wrong stage.

Hard rules:
- Do not specify fonts, hex codes, or layouts unless I gave them as fixed constraints. That's the designer's job and hiring for it then overriding it wastes the money.
- Every adjective must be paired with a consequence a designer can act on. "Premium" alone is meaningless; say what premium looks like here and what it costs us elsewhere.
- Flag any request that is my personal taste rather than a brand requirement.

End with the **three questions the designer will ask** that this brief doesn't yet answer.