Project brief
A one-page summary of the job: goal, audience, deliverables, constraints, and how you will both know it worked.
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What it is
A project brief is the short document that fixes the shape of the work before anyone prices or builds it: the goal, the audience, the deliverables, the constraints (budget, deadline, tech, brand rules), and how success gets measured. One page is the target. If it needs five, the project needs a discovery phase, not a longer brief.
It is not a contract and not a spec. The statement of work says what you are legally on the hook to deliver; the brief says what the work is trying to achieve and for whom, which is what keeps design decisions arguable on merit rather than taste. Written well, the brief becomes the thing you point at when a request arrives that does not serve the stated goal.
Gotcha: a brief the client wrote alone is a wish list, and a brief you wrote alone is a guess. Draft it together on the call, then send it back for written confirmation. The single most-skipped field is success measures, and it is the one that later decides whether the project was good. 'Modern and clean' is not a measure. 'Cut the signup drop-off, launch before the March trade show' is.
Ask AI for it
Draft a one-page project brief from the notes below. Use these headings and nothing else: Background (2 sentences on why this is happening now), Goal (one sentence, outcome not output), Audience (who it is for and what they are trying to do), Scope (bulleted list of concrete deliverables), Out of scope (explicit list of what is not included), Constraints (budget, deadline, tech stack, brand or legal rules), Success measures (2 to 3 measurable outcomes with numbers or dates), Approvals (who signs off, in how many rounds). Keep every bullet under 15 words, flag anything the notes do not answer as an 'Open question' at the end, and do not invent facts. Notes: [paste]