Write the design brief

Canva AI can draft a polished post in seconds. Because polish now costs almost nothing, it no longer tells you much about a design. Accuracy still costs something. A beautiful post that says thirty when your bundle has thirty-six is still wrong, and it goes out under your shop's name.

Paul Roetzer, founder of the Marketing AI Institute, says knowledge workers "do not get to decide" what the AI labs build. What you do decide is how you work with it. Melanie Perkins, Canva's co-founder and chief executive, says her company has rebuilt every specialty around AI, design included. That is her description of her own company, not an independent finding.

This course gives you a method, and it starts before any prompt. You write three short documents yourself:

1. A design brief: a one-page statement of the design's single job.
2. A facts sheet: what is true about your offer.
3. Brand rules sorted into four lists.

Every later prompt and check draws on these three documents.

A design brief gives the design one job. It has four lines, and each line holds only one answer:

• Audience: who the design is for.
• Message: the one thing they should take away.
• Format: the size and place it will appear.
• Action: the one thing you want them to do.

Here is a café's weekly post:

Audience: regulars who come in on weekday mornings Message: the new cardamom bun is on the menu this week Format: square social post Action: order by Friday

Keep each line to a single answer. If you write two audiences or three messages, the AI will try to serve all of them and the post will serve none of them well.

If you can't fill a line, the design isn't ready to prompt. A blank action line means you haven't decided what the post is for yet, and no prompt can decide that for you.

Below the four lines, your brief lists brand guidance in two separate groups.

Required brand elements stay the same in every design: your business name spelled exactly, your logo, your brand colours (the exact colour codes) and your fonts. The AI must not change them.

Optional directions are suggestions the AI may interpret: mood, image ideas, layout style. You might write "warm, early-morning feel" or "bun on a wooden board". If the AI offers a different image idea, that's fine.

Why keep the groups apart? A prompt that mixes them, such as "cosy, Rosa's Bakehouse colours, maybe a soft font", gives the AI the same freedom with all of it. You end up with a nice-looking post in the wrong green with your name in a font you never chose.

Put the two groups under separate headings in the brief, and say in your prompt that only the optional group may vary.

A facts sheet lists what's true about the offer, in your own words. Prompts draw only from it. For a template shop selling a bundle for bakeries, it might read:

• Count: 30 social templates
• Sizes: square post, tall pin, story
• What a buyer can change: text, colours, photos
• Claims: tested with long business names
• Dates: launch date: to confirm

The last line matters most. If you don't know something yet, the field stays blank and is marked to confirm. Never let the AI fill it in. An AI asked for a launch post with no date will often make one up, or write "available now". The result reads well and is wrong.

The same applies to claims. "Works on the free Canva plan" goes on the sheet only after you have checked it yourself. Until then it is to confirm, and it stays out of every prompt.

Brand designers have always written down rules for their clients. Here you write them for the AI as well. Sort every rule into one of four lists:

1. True: facts about the product. The bundle has 30 templates.
2. Fixed: things that never change. Logo and brand colours.
3. May flex: things the AI can vary. Image choice, background shade.
4. Never ships without you: things that always need your personal approval. Price, dates, claims, anything published.

The lists overlap with your other documents on purpose. The true list mirrors the facts sheet. The fixed and may-flex lists mirror the required and optional groups in your brief. The fourth list is new. It names the decisions you keep, however fast the drafting gets.

Within these rules the AI can work as quickly as it likes. Without them, you'll find yourself re-checking everything every time.

You could ask the AI to write your brief and facts sheet. Don't. There are two reasons.

It builds your judgment. Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, says he became sharper because he wrote his book himself. The hard work of putting his ideas in an order others could follow is, in his words, "what made me grow". Writing your own brief does the same for you. Every check later in this course depends on knowing what the design is meant to say, and you only know that if you decided it.

It's what you compete on. Josh Silverman, Etsy's chief executive when he spoke, said Etsy wants to reward the makers who innovate first, and uses AI to see "who was first" among near-identical items. A copy can always be made a penny cheaper. Your original idea and your true facts can't be copied that way.

So the split is simple. You supply the idea and the facts, and the AI drafts inside them.

Your three documents are what the AI tool will see, so they should hold only what that tool is allowed to see.

Leave out:

• Customer lists, such as the names and emails of your regulars
• Private campaign data, such as unreleased sales figures or a client's internal plans
• Images that identify people, such as a photo of a customer at your counter, unless the tool has been approved for them

An approved tool is one your business, or your client, has agreed may handle that kind of data. If you're not sure, assume it hasn't been approved. The brief doesn't need a customer's name to say "regulars who come in on weekday mornings".

Once the brief, facts sheet and four lists are written and cleaned of private data, you're ready for the next lesson. There you'll prompt Canva AI for headline, support-line and call-to-action options and judge them against what you've written here.