The brief is never the brief
What a client asks for and what they need are rarely the same thing. Our work starts in the gap between the two.
Category
Studio
Written by
Ines Carvalho
Published
21 October 2026
Reading time
6 min read
Every project starts with a document. It says what the client wants, when they want it and what they can spend. It is almost always wrong, and that is not a complaint.
What the page leaves out
A brief is written by people who are too close to the problem to see it. They ask for a new logo because the logo is the part they can point at. The trouble is usually somewhere quieter: a product nobody can describe in one sentence, or a company that has outgrown its own story.
So our first week is spent asking questions that feel almost rude. Who would miss you if you closed tomorrow? What do your own staff get wrong when they explain what you do? The answers are the real brief.
Why we only take four projects
This kind of listening does not scale. It needs the same people in the room from the first call to the launch, and it needs them not to be thinking about nine other clients. Four projects at a time is the largest number at which that stays true for a studio of our size.
It means we say no often. It also means that when we say yes, the whole studio is behind it.
