Template · 10 minutes
Designer Handoff Kit.
Fill in your project. Get a ready-to-send brief covering pages, integrations, brand, and timeline. Forward to me, your current designer, or three designers for comparable quotes inside a week.
Back to The VaultMost designer quotes vary by 4x because the briefs vary by 10x. The same project gets a $1,800 quote and a $7,500 quote because nobody on either side wrote down what the project actually is. This template is the standard brief.
Filling it out forces you to make the decisions that designers usually have to charge you to make. Comparable quotes back in 7 days instead of 4 weeks of clarifying calls.
What every section of the brief covers
A real brief has 6 parts. Skip any of them and you get unusable quotes.
01 · Project overview
What you do, who pays you, why a site
One sentence on the business plus one sentence on what the site has to deliver. Designers use this to know if they are the right fit before quoting.
02 · Page list
Specific pages, not "a few pages"
A specific page count drives 80 percent of the quote. Vague counts produce wide quote ranges. Lock the count first.
03 · Integrations
Booking, forms, CRM, payments
Each integration adds 2 to 8 hours of work. Listing them upfront lets the designer scope cleanly instead of treating them as change orders later.
04 · Brand assets
Logo + colors + fonts + voice
Designing from scratch costs 30 to 50 percent more than dressing existing brand. Knowing the starting point shifts the quote and the timeline.
05 · Timeline + budget
Real numbers, not "ASAP"
"As soon as possible" gets ignored or overcharged. A real deadline plus a real budget filters serious designers from time-wasters.
06 · Goals + references
What success looks like
Three concrete goals plus two reference sites you actually like. The designer can quote against the outcome, not the spec, and you can reject quotes that miss the goal.
Want this emailed to yourself?
Your full brief, formatted for forwarding. Hit reply with quotes and I will help you compare them.
No newsletter. No auto-follow-up.
What people who skipped the brief say later
Got three quotes that ranged from $1,800 to $9,000 for the same project. Realized halfway through that I had told each one a slightly different story. The brief would have saved me a month of confusion.
r/smallbusiness · 2026-04
My designer said "10 weeks" verbally on the kickoff call. Three months in we were still on the homepage. There was no written timeline anywhere. I had no leverage to push back.
r/web_design · 2026-03
Quote was for "a website." Halfway through I added a booking form. The change order was $2,400 because it was technically out of scope. Should have listed integrations upfront.
r/freelance · 2026-04