Bespoke-brief swipe file.

Twelve questions, asked in order, on a call. They pull a tight brief out of a vague idea in about an hour. They are not clever, they are not proprietary, and they do not need a workshop. They need you to shut up after asking them and let the client finish their sentence.

The twelve

1. What would have to be true, twelve months from now, for this site to have been worth commissioning?Forces a single measurable outcome before scope can drift.
2. Who lands on the homepage? Give me the role, the stage, and one thing they’re worried about at 11pm the night before they hire you.Moves from demographic to psychographic. Audiences with 11pm problems convert.
3. If a visitor reads exactly one sentence on the homepage, what is it?If there are two sentences, the positioning is not ready.
4. Who are the three companies that sound right, and the three that absolutely don’t?Voice is defined by edges, not by adjectives.
5. What is the single action you want the visitor to take, and what is the next one after that?Every CTA audit. Every layout decision. Starts here.
6. Which objections kill the deal before the call? In what order?Ordered objections drive section order. Unordered ones create noise.
7. What is the proof? Who has said the nice thing, where, dated?Prevents fabricated social proof and unsourced stats.
8. Who signs the cheque, and who signs off on copy? Are they the same person?If not, the week has two decision-makers and a process problem.
9. What pages are non-negotiable, and what pages are on the list because “every site has one”?Cuts the brief from twelve pages to the five that actually move the business.
10. What on the current site works, exactly, and what is broken, precisely?Specifics prevent total rewrites when a tune-up would do.
11. If the budget doubled, what would we add? If it halved, what would we cut first?Reveals the client’s real priority stack in one question.
12. What is the deadline, and what happens at 00:01 the day after?A deadline without a consequence is a preference.

How to use this

Ask them in order. Do not skip ahead when an answer is uncomfortable — the uncomfortable answers are the ones the brief needs. Write them down as they are said, in the client’s language, not your own. Paraphrasing at brief-time is how Friday revision rounds happen.

The first answer is rarely the real answer. Every question has a good follow-up: “And why that?” Ask it once. Not twice — twice is an interrogation.

What comes out the other end

If all twelve answers fit on one page, you have a brief you can build from on Monday. If they do not, you have a brief you need another hour with. There is no third option where you begin designing anyway and “clarify as we go”. That is how a week becomes a month.