# Sosai Studio — full text > The free creative briefing engine. This file is the long form of https://sosai.studio/llms.txt: the same site, but with the text itself rather than links to it. Last content change: 2026-09-20. Terminology used consistently: the product is **Sosai Studio**, the document it produces is a **creative brief**, and the act of making one is **briefing**. ## What it costs - **Free** ($0): unlimited briefings, the full dialog, PDF export and a permanent public share link. No card, no time limit. One thing is metered: reading sources runs 5 times per calendar month. Free briefs carry the Sosai mark. - **Sosai Pro** ($29 USD per month): unlimited source reading, white-labeling, a client intake link, a ready job post text, and team seats. A 14 day trial starts without a card, once per studio. --- # How to write a design brief The full guide, as published at https://sosai.studio/help/how-to-write-a-design-brief. ## The short version A usable design brief answers ten things. 1. **Goals.** What has to be different once the work is done. 2. **Audience.** Who sees it, and where. 3. **Brand and voice.** What you stand for and how you sound. 4. **Style.** What it should look like, shown rather than described. 5. **Color.** What's fixed, what's open. 6. **Scope.** Every file and format you expect to receive. 7. **Budget and timeline.** A range and a date, with the reason behind the date. 8. **Do's and don'ts.** What's off the table. 9. **References.** Examples, each with a line on what you're pointing at. 10. **Your own words.** The original message, pasted in unedited. ## The sections, one by one ### Goals *The question it answers:* What should this project achieve? *What goes in it:* One or two sentences on what has to be different once the work is done. Say what the new thing has to do, and leave how it looks to the designer. *What it costs when it is missing:* Without it, every decision comes back to you as a question, and usually two rounds too late. *Weak:* We need a new logo. *Usable:* We sell to architects, and our current mark reads as a toy brand at small sizes on drawings. It has to hold up at 16 px and sit comfortably next to engineering firms. ### Audience *The question it answers:* Who is this for, exactly? *What goes in it:* The people who'll see the work, described the way you'd describe them to a colleague. Where they run into your brand matters more than their age. *What it costs when it is missing:* Audience settles more arguments than any other line. Half the taste questions on a project turn out to be audience questions. *Weak:* Everyone. Mostly younger people. *Usable:* Practice owners between 35 and 55, comparing three suppliers on a phone at the end of a long day, most of them burned by a cheap rebrand before. ### Brand and voice *The question it answers:* What do you stand for, and how do you sound? *What goes in it:* Your name, your category in plain words, and how the brand talks to a customer. Pick a voice and read a sample out loud. *What it costs when it is missing:* When a brief calls a brand warm in one line and authoritative in the next, every headline becomes a negotiation. *Weak:* Professional but friendly. Modern. *Usable:* Plain and direct, the way a good tradesperson talks. Short sentences, no superlatives, never the word solutions. Warmth comes from being useful. ### Style *The question it answers:* What should it look like? *What goes in it:* Show it. Pick reference images wherever you can, and add one line saying what the image is doing that you like. *What it costs when it is missing:* Style words carry the most misunderstanding per syllable. Editorial, premium and clean mean something different to everyone in the room, and nobody notices until the first presentation. *Weak:* Clean, modern, premium. *Usable:* Like the middle reference: lots of white space, one strong photograph, type doing the work. Skip the third one, that ornament is too much for us. ### Color *The question it answers:* What's fixed, and what's open? *What goes in it:* The colors you already own, as values rather than names, and how far a designer can move away from them. *What it costs when it is missing:* Most brands already have colors in use somewhere. The brief is where they get written down or quietly reinvented, and reinventing them costs a round of revisions, sometimes a reprint. *Weak:* Our blue, plus something fresh. *Usable:* The blue in our website header stays, everything else is open. Avoid green, our biggest competitor owns it here. ### Scope *The question it answers:* What exactly are you getting? *What goes in it:* Every file and format you expect to receive, with sizes, quantities and platforms where they matter. *What it costs when it is missing:* Scope is what a quote is built on. Leave it out and you get four different assumptions, and the cheapest one assumed the least. *Weak:* A logo and some brand stuff. *Usable:* Primary logo plus a horizontal version and an icon, SVG and PNG, with a one page usage sheet. No stationery, we print nothing. ### Budget and timeline *The question it answers:* What's the money, and what's the date? *What goes in it:* A range is plenty, and open to a proposal is a real answer. If the date is fixed by something, name the thing. *What it costs when it is missing:* Leaving the budget out doesn't get you a better price, it gets you proposals aimed at the wrong bracket. And a deadline without its reason can't be negotiated when something has to give. *Weak:* We're flexible. As soon as possible. *Usable:* Between 4,000 and 6,000, open to a proposal if it changes the scope. The trade fair is on 14 March and stand graphics go to print three weeks before. ### Do's and don'ts *The question it answers:* What's off the table? *What goes in it:* The constraints that aren't up for discussion, and the things you've already tried and rejected. *What it costs when it is missing:* This is the cheapest section you'll write. Every line here is a revision round that doesn't happen. *Weak:* Nothing too crazy. *Usable:* Has to work in one color for embroidery. Never the mascot, it was retired after a complaint. No stock photos of people in hard hats. ### References *The question it answers:* What have you seen that works? *What goes in it:* Links or images, each with one line on what you're pointing at. Things you dislike are just as useful. *What it costs when it is missing:* Send a reference without a sentence and the designer has to guess whether you meant the layout, the color or the photography. Guess wrong, and they do the wrong work carefully. *Weak:* Here are a few sites we like. *Usable:* This one for how the navigation stays out of the way. This one for the photography only, the type is far too loud for us. ### Your own words *The question it answers:* What did you actually say? *What goes in it:* The original message, pasted in unedited, mess and all. *What it costs when it is missing:* Every summary loses something, and never the part you expected. The raw text is where a designer finds the sentence that explains the rest. *Weak:* Client wants it to feel more premium. *Usable:* The whole email, including the line about their biggest customer calling the packaging cheap. That sentence is worth more than the word premium. ## Common mistakes - **Describing the solution instead of the problem** A brief that already asks for a blue sans-serif logo has spent the part you're paying for. Say what has to be true at the end and leave the how open. - **Reaching for adjectives when an example would do** Modern, clean and premium survive every review meeting because nobody disagrees with them, which is exactly why they decide nothing. One reference with a sentence beats ten adjectives. - **Leaving out the money** An unnamed budget gets guessed at, usually wrong in both directions, and the correction costs a round of work somebody has to pay for. --- # Questions and answers The full help, as published at https://sosai.studio/help. ## The basics **What is Sosai Studio?** Sosai Studio writes design briefs. You give it what already exists about a project, a website, a few files, the half written message you gave up on, and it reads all of that before it asks you anything. Then it asks only about what is still missing, in plain language. What comes out is one document a designer can quote against and start from. **What exactly is a creative brief here?** One document with what a designer needs before starting: the goal, the audience, the scope, the budget and timeline, the tone, the colors actually in use, and the things to avoid. Your own words are quoted at the end, in a section Sosai is never allowed to rewrite. Everything else is assembled from your material and your answers. **How long does it take?** About five minutes for most briefs. Reading your sources takes a minute or two on its own, and you can leave the tab while it runs. How many questions you get depends on how much your material already answered. A rich website leaves a short conversation, a blank page a longer one. **Does my client need an account?** No. Only you sign in. Your client reads the finished brief through a share link, or fills one in through a client link, and neither needs an account. ## Making a briefing **How do I start a briefing?** Press New briefing and give it whatever you have. A link is the strongest single thing you can paste: a website, a portfolio, a social profile. You can add files as well, a PDF, screenshots of things the client liked, a logo, and you can paste loose notes. None of it has to be tidy, and nothing is mandatory. You can start from a blank page and answer everything in the dialog instead. **What does the analysis actually read?** For a link: the visible text of the page, its metadata, and a full page screenshot. For images: a compressed copy, the dominant colors measured as hex values, and a style reading. The colors are measured pixel by pixel, not guessed by a model. That is the difference between a palette you can hand to a printer and one that merely sounds right. **What can the analysis not read?** A scanned PDF with no text layer. There is nothing in the file to read, so Sosai says so and asks you to paste the key points rather than inventing them. A page behind a login or a cookie gate. The crawler is reported as blocked instead of briefing you on a consent banner. A stock theme can fool the palette. Some sites declare a full rainbow in CSS that appears nowhere on the page, and when the measured colors look like a template default, Sosai flags it for you to correct. And it does not know your client. Everything you learned on the phone is still yours to add, and every field stays editable. **What do I do when I cannot answer a question?** Press Help me, Saya on that question and talk it through in a few sentences. It works on every question, including tone, budget and the ones with options to pick from. Saya drafts, you decide. Nothing enters the brief until you press the button, and you can rewrite the draft first or ignore it. **How does it ask what something should look like?** In pictures. Every briefing is asked for a visual direction, and instead of a text box you get six cards to choose one or two from. The brief writes the professional term down afterwards, so nobody has to know the vocabulary to be understood by it. How the brand speaks is a separate question, asked wherever the brand actually speaks. Every tone has a sample sentence behind it: tap one and you read how it sounds. All the samples say the same thing, so the only difference you hear is the tone. Both are answered in advance where your sources already show it. Tone in particular is usually written on the website in so many words. **Can I change a briefing after it is finished?** Yes. Open it and edit any section directly, the text stays yours. Reopening the dialog lets you answer questions differently, and the document is rebuilt from your new answers. Adding a new source and running the analysis again counts as a new analysis run against your monthly allowance. Editing text, exporting and sharing never do. **How do I send it to someone?** Two ways, and both are free. A share link opens the brief in a browser, read only, no login. A PDF export gives you the same document as a file to attach. You can withdraw a share link at any time from your briefs list, after which it stops working. Anyone who already opened it may still hold a copy of what they saw. ## Free and Pro **What does Free include?** As many briefings as you like, finished in full, with the whole dialog, the PDF and a permanent public share link. There is no card and no time limit. One thing is metered: reading your sources. That runs 5 times a calendar month and starts over on the first of the next month. The difference on Free is whose name is on the document. Free briefs carry the Sosai mark; Pro puts your studio there instead. **What counts as an analysis run?** One run is one press of the analyse button, however many sources you gave it. Ten images and two links read together are one run, not twelve. Finishing a brief, editing it, exporting the PDF and sharing the link cost nothing and are never counted. Your remaining runs and the reset date are shown on your overview. **What does Pro add?** Pro is $29 USD a month. It reads sources without a monthly limit, and it puts your studio on everything that leaves it: your logo and colors on the brief, and your brand on the PDF instead of ours. It also unlocks the client intake link, so your client fills the briefing in under your name, a ready job post text from every briefing, and team seats so your studio works in one shared workspace. **How do I try Pro?** Press any Pro feature. The same dialog opens everywhere and starts a 14 day trial with no card, once per studio. Pro features stay visible on Free rather than being hidden, so you can see what you would be turning on before you turn it on. **How do I cancel, and what happens to my briefings?** Cancel from Settings, Billing. The subscription runs to the end of the period you paid for and is not renewed. Nothing is deleted when you go back to Free. Your briefings stay, stay shareable and stay exportable. They carry the Sosai mark again instead of yours, and source reading returns to the monthly allowance. ## The client intake link **What is a client intake link?** A private link you send to your client. They open it, see your logo and your colors rather than ours, and answer the questions themselves. When they submit, the briefing lands in your dashboard and you are notified by email. It is the one place where a link without a login can write. Everything about it is deliberately narrow, see below. **What can someone with the link do?** Fill in exactly that one briefing, and nothing else. No dashboard, no other briefings, no settings, no exports. They can submit up to 10 sources and run the analysis up to 3 times. The link expires after 30 days, dies the moment your client submits, can be withdrawn by you at any time, and never opens a briefing that is already finished. **What happens after my client submits?** The briefing is yours to finish. You review what they wrote, fill any remaining gaps yourself, edit anything that needs it, and then export or share it as usual. Their own words stay quoted verbatim, so you can see what came from them and what came from you. ## Your files and your data **What happens to the files I upload?** They are stored with the briefing they belong to, together with a compressed preview and the colors measured from them. They are used to build that brief and nothing else. Deleting a briefing removes its sources, its analysis, its answers and its uploads. Your files are never used to train a model. **Does the AI see my client's data?** Excerpts of the briefing text and the images go to a language model so it can judge style and spot gaps. Before any text is sent, contact details in it are stripped and replaced with placeholders. The model orchestrates and asks. It never processes your data on its own account, and color values are measured by us rather than generated. **Can anyone find a shared briefing?** Only someone holding the link. The address contains an unguessable token, and shared briefings are marked not to be indexed by search engines, because they are client documents rather than marketing pages. Withdrawing the link from your briefs list stops it working immediately. **How do I delete my data?** Delete individual briefs from your briefs list, or the whole account from Settings, Account, which removes the studio and everything in it. You can also ask us to do it, or ask for a copy of what we hold, by writing to hello@sosai.studio. ## Account and studio **How do I sign in?** With a one time link sent to your email, or with Google. There is no password to forget. If the email has not arrived after a minute, check the spam folder, then try again. The link is single use and expires, so always use the newest one. **Can my studio work in one place?** Yes, on Pro. Invite your colleagues from Settings, Team, and everyone sees the same briefs, the same clients and the same branding. **Can I turn off the reminder emails?** Yes. Every reminder has a link at the bottom that switches them off in one click, without signing in, and you can also turn them on and off under Settings, Account. There are three of them: a nudge when a studio has no brief yet, a reminder about a brief still waiting, and a note that a brief is ready. Emails you ask for, like a sign-in link or an invitation, are not affected. **Something is wrong and this page does not cover it.** Write to hello@sosai.studio and describe what you did and what happened instead. If it concerns one brief, send the link to it, that saves a round trip. ## For freelancers **Is it really free?** Yes, and it doesn't expire. You can brief as many projects as you like, finish all of them, export the PDF and share the link, without a card. One thing is metered, because it costs us money every time: reading your sources. Crawling a site and looking at uploads runs 5 times a month and resets on the first. Writing, editing, exporting and sharing are never counted. **Can I send it out under my own name?** On Pro, yes: your logo and your color on the brief, the share link and the PDF, with one small line at the end crediting the engine. Pro is $29 a month. On the free plan the document carries the Sosai mark instead. Everything else is identical, and you can try Pro for 14 days without a card. **What if the client won't answer anything?** Then you answer for them. Paste their website and whatever they sent, and most of the brief fills itself in before the first question. Where something is genuinely unknown, leave it open. A brief that says the budget is undecided is more useful than one with a number you invented. **Is it worth it for a small job?** That's where it pays most. A one page site or a flyer rarely gets a written brief at all, and that's exactly where a misunderstanding costs a whole round of revisions. The questions match the project type, so a flyer isn't asked about print runs it doesn't have. **Can I edit the brief afterwards?** Any section, any time, and the text stays yours. You can also reopen the conversation and answer differently, and the document is rebuilt from your new answers. Editing, exporting and sharing never count against your monthly analyses. Only reading new sources does. **What happens to the files and links I submit?** They're stored with that one brief, used to build it, and nothing else. Deleting the brief deletes its sources, its analysis and its uploads. Excerpts go to a language model so it can spot gaps and judge style, with contact details stripped out first. Your files are never used to train a model. ## For agencies and studios **How does the client link actually work?** You create it for one project and send it. Your client opens it without an account, sees your logo and colors, and answers the questions in their own time. When they submit, the brief lands in your dashboard and you get an email. It expires after 30 days, closes itself the moment they submit, and you can withdraw it at any point. It only ever opens that one brief, never your dashboard or anything else. **What does white-label cover?** Your logo in the header, your color on the rules, and your studio name in the footer, on the page your client fills in, on the share link and on the PDF. One small line at the end credits the engine, the way a studio is credited at the bottom of a website. Everything above it is yours. **Can my whole team work in one place?** Yes, on Pro. Invite your colleagues and everyone gets their own sign-in, with briefs and branding belonging to the studio rather than to whoever created them. Billing and branding stay with the owner, so a colleague can run every brief without being able to cancel your subscription. **What if our client gets stuck on a question?** That's what Help me, Saya is for, and it's the reason a link works instead of a meeting. Your client talks the question through in a few sentences and gets wording back that they can accept or rewrite. Nothing enters the brief until they press the button, and their own words are kept verbatim at the end of the document. **What happens to our briefs if we cancel?** Nothing is deleted. Your briefs stay, stay shareable and stay exportable. They carry the Sosai mark again instead of yours, and source reading returns to the monthly allowance. Cancelling runs to the end of the period you already paid for, from Settings, Billing. **What happens to the files and links I submit?** They're stored with that one brief, used to build it, and nothing else. Deleting the brief deletes its sources, its analysis and its uploads. Excerpts go to a language model so it can spot gaps and judge style, with contact details stripped out first. Your files are never used to train a model. ## For people commissioning design **Do I need to know design words?** No, and that's the point. The look is asked in pictures, the tone with sample sentences you can read out loud, and everything else in plain language. The brief writes down the professional term on your behalf, so a designer reads exactly what you meant. **What if I don't know my budget?** Say so. Open to a proposal is a real answer, and the brief records it that way. Leaving the number out entirely is what causes trouble: designers then quote into the dark, and the four numbers you get back can't be compared. **Can I send the same brief to several designers?** Yes, and that's where it earns its keep. Everyone reads the same facts, so the quotes that come back mean something next to each other. Send it as a link or a PDF, and withdraw the link whenever you like. **What if I want to post the job publicly?** Pro turns the finished brief into the text a marketplace form asks for, assembled from your own answers so it can never say something the document doesn't. Pro is $29 a month. The brief itself, the PDF and the share link are free, with or without that. **Will my next project be easier?** Yes. The same questions, the same document, and your brand details already measured from your website. Most of the repeat work is gone. Designers you work with more than once recognise the format too, which shortens the conversation before it starts. **Is it really free?** Yes, and it doesn't expire. You can brief as many projects as you like, finish all of them, export the PDF and share the link, without a card. One thing is metered, because it costs us money every time: reading your sources. Crawling a site and looking at uploads runs 5 times a month and resets on the first. Writing, editing, exporting and sharing are never counted. ## About the plans **Is it really free?** Yes, and it doesn't expire. You can brief as many projects as you like, finish all of them, export the PDF and share the link, without a card. One thing is metered, because it costs us money every time: reading your sources. Crawling a site and looking at uploads runs 5 times a month and resets on the first. Writing, editing, exporting and sharing are never counted. **What counts as one analysis run?** One press of the analyse button, however many sources you gave it. Ten images and two links read together are one run, not twelve. Adding a new source later and analysing again is a second run. Finishing, editing, exporting and sharing cost nothing. **How do I try Pro?** Press any Pro feature. The same dialog opens everywhere and starts a 14 day trial with no card, once per studio. Pro features stay visible on the free plan rather than being hidden, so you can see what you would be turning on. **Can I cancel, and what happens then?** Cancel from Settings, Billing. The subscription runs to the end of the period you paid for and isn't renewed. Your briefs stay, stay shareable and stay exportable. They carry the Sosai mark again, and source reading returns to the monthly allowance. **Why is everything in dollars?** The interface is English and most of our customers are in the United States, so the price is quoted in USD. Your card issuer converts it at their rate. Invoices and receipts come from Stripe and are in your account under Settings, Billing. **Is there a plan for a bigger team?** Pro includes seats for your studio, so everyone works in one shared workspace on the same subscription. If you need something beyond that, write to us and we'll sort it out rather than send you to a form. ## About the briefing formats **What if my project type isn't listed?** Pick the closest one. The questions overlap more than the labels suggest, and every brief asks the same core set about goals, audience, scope, budget and tone. Tell us what's missing and we'll add it. The list grows from what people actually brief. **Can I change the type after I start?** Yes. Your answers to the shared questions are kept, and only the type specific ones change. Nothing is lost, and nothing has to be typed again. **Are these the real questions?** They're read straight out of the engine, so what you see on this page is what you would actually be asked. How many of them you get depends on your material. Anything your website or your files already answered is filled in before the conversation starts. **Can one brief cover several deliverables?** Yes, and a campaign or a brand guide is built that way. Pick the type that describes the whole job rather than one piece of it. For genuinely separate projects, separate briefs are clearer, and they cost nothing. **Is it really free?** Yes, and it doesn't expire. You can brief as many projects as you like, finish all of them, export the PDF and share the link, without a card. One thing is metered, because it costs us money every time: reading your sources. Crawling a site and looking at uploads runs 5 times a month and resets on the first. Writing, editing, exporting and sharing are never counted. --- # Example briefs 39 complete creative briefs, one per kind of project. Each link opens the finished document. - [Logo design brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/logo-design-brief) - [Logo & brand style guide brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/brand-style-guide-brief) - [Brand guidelines brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/brand-guidelines-brief) - [Rebrand brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/rebrand-brief) - [Naming brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/naming-brief) - [Website brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/website-design-brief) - [Landing page brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/landing-page-brief) - [Online shop brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/online-shop-design-brief) - [App design (iOS / Android) brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/mobile-app-design-brief) - [Web app / dashboard brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/web-app-design-brief) - [Email / newsletter template brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/email-newsletter-design-brief) - [Packaging brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/packaging-design-brief) - [Label (bottle, jar, can) brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/label-design-brief) - [Book cover brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/book-cover-design-brief) - [Book layout / typesetting brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/book-layout-brief) - [Magazine brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/magazine-design-brief) - [Catalogue brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/catalogue-design-brief) - [Brochure brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/brochure-design-brief) - [Podcast / album cover brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/podcast-cover-design-brief) - [T-shirt design brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/t-shirt-design-brief) - [Merch (hoodie, mug, tote, cap) brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/merch-design-brief) - [Stickers brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/sticker-design-brief) - [Flyer / postcard brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/flyer-design-brief) - [Poster brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/poster-design-brief) - [Business card brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/business-card-design-brief) - [Infographic brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/infographic-design-brief) - [Vehicle wrap brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/vehicle-wrap-design-brief) - [Signage / trade fair stand brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/signage-design-brief) - [Pitch deck brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/pitch-deck-design-brief) - [Presentation / slide template brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/presentation-design-brief) - [Explainer video brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/explainer-video-brief) - [Social video / reel brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/social-video-brief) - [Ad spot / commercial brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/ad-spot-brief) - [Motion graphics / animation brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/motion-graphics-brief) - [Logo animation brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/logo-animation-brief) - [Campaign (multi-channel) brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/campaign-brief) - [Social content package brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/social-content-brief) - [Social profile & banners brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/social-profile-design-brief) - [Something else, describe it brief](https://sosai.studio/examples/creative-brief)