Who the guest is
A designer works faster and better when they know who the room is set for. A couple booking an anniversary dinner reads a website differently from a group of colleagues booking a Friday lunch, and a family choosing a hotel for half term looks for different things again. Write down who walks through the door on a typical Tuesday and who walks through on a Saturday, because most venues serve both and the brief needs to say so.
The check before you brief anyone: could you describe your regular guest in two sentences without using the word "everyone"? If the honest answer is that the venue serves whoever turns up, that is worth saying in the brief, because it changes how a designer builds flexibility into the identity and the website.
The price point, without the prices
A designer needs to know roughly where the venue sits, a counter-service café or a tasting-menu dining room, because that shapes the weight of the materials, the density of the menu layout and the tone of the photography brief. Describe the venue by comparison instead: closer to a neighbourhood bistro than a hotel restaurant, or priced for a quick weekday lunch rather than an occasion booking. That single sentence tells a designer more than a list of dish prices would, because it sets the visual register the whole identity has to hold.
The room and the service style
The physical room and the way it runs both feed directly into design decisions, so describe them. State the number of covers, whether service is at the table or at a counter, whether the space turns tables quickly or holds them for a long evening, and what the lighting actually does after dark. A 40-cover restaurant with two sittings a night needs a menu that reads fast; a 12-room hotel with a slow breakfast service can afford a menu that takes longer to enjoy.
Service style also determines what the website has to do at the point of booking, covered in more detail in what a restaurant or hotel website actually has to do. A bar with a weekly changing menu needs an update routine built into the brief from the start; a fixed menu with seasonal specials does not.
References that help, and references that mislead
A reference image tells a designer something useful when it points at a quality, a palette, a level of restraint, and something misleading when it is simply a venue the owner admires without knowing why. "I like the mood of this dining room" is a workable reference. "I want a website exactly like this one" usually is not, because the admired site was built for a different guest, a different room and a different budget, and copying its surface without its reasoning tends to produce something that fits none of the three.
Photographs of the actual room, in its actual light, show a designer what they are actually designing for. Send the room as it is before you send anyone else's version of what a room could be.
The practical constraints to name up front
A brief that omits the practical limits costs time later, when work already done has to be reworked to fit them. Three worth stating before anything is designed:
- Print: any menu or card that goes to a printer needs to work in the stock, the finish and the size the venue actually orders.
- Signage: a brand mark that reads well on a screen does not always read well lit above a door at night, so say where the mark will actually appear.
- Listings platforms: Google Business Profile, TripAdvisor and similar sites crop and resize images and logos to their own dimensions, so a design built only for the website may not survive being placed there unaltered.
None of these are afterthoughts a designer should discover independently. Naming them in the brief means the identity is built to survive contact with the places it actually has to appear.
Giving feedback that moves the work forward
Feedback that names a reason moves a design on; feedback that names a preference sends it in circles. "This blue reads corporate against the room we described" gives a designer something to act on, because it ties the note back to a decision already made in the brief. "I don't love it" does not, because there is nothing in it to respond to except a guess at what might replace it.
Where a note conflicts with something agreed earlier, an owner who says which one has changed, the guest, the room, the price point, saves a round of revisions built on a misunderstanding. The brief is the reference point for every round of feedback that follows it, so keep returning to it.
Building the brief
A written brief that covers the guest, the price point, the room, the service style and the constraints above gives a designer everything they need to start without guessing. The guides and tools section includes a brief builder that walks through each of these points in order, for an owner who wants to draft one before speaking to anyone. Where the venue is ready to start the conversation directly, send a brief and the scope of work follows from it.