01The four things that genuinely matter
Send these four and any competent builder can start today. The reason the list is short is that everything else can be decided later, in public, on a page you can already see. Most briefs fail not because they are missing information but because they are missing a decision, and a decision is easier to make when you are looking at something concrete rather than imagining it. Your reference link, your services in plain words, how someone reaches you, and whatever photographs you already own are enough to produce something concrete.
- One reference website. Not a description of a style, an actual URL you like.
- What you sell, in the words you use with customers, not marketing language.
- How someone contacts or buys from you: phone, WhatsApp, form, booking link.
- Any photos of your real work, your real space or your real team.
02Why a reference link beats a written brief
Describing design in words is genuinely hard, and it is hard for designers too, which is why they show each other work instead of describing it. Clean means minimal to one person and uncluttered-but-warm to another. Modern has meant four different things in the last decade. A link collapses all of that: layout density, colour temperature, how much white space, how loud the typography, how the thing feels when you scroll it. You are not asking for a copy. You are handing over a shared reference point, and every later conversation gets cheaper because you both have one.
- Words like clean, modern and professional mean something different to every person who reads them.
- A link communicates layout, density, colour temperature and tone at once.
- It is faster to send. Two minutes instead of an evening staring at a blank document.
- It gives you something concrete to point at when you want a change.
03What you can safely leave until later
These are the things people delay a project for, and almost none of them need to hold anything up. The pattern is always the same: a piece of content that feels important, is not urgent, and becomes the reason nothing exists for three months. Placeholder text that fits the shape of the page can be swapped in ten minutes after launch. A wordmark is a perfectly respectable logo until you can afford better. The one genuine exception is photography of your own work, because nobody can invent that, and it is worth being honest that the first version looks better once it arrives.
- Finished copy. Placeholder text that fits can be replaced after launch.
- A logo, if you do not have one yet. A wordmark works and can be upgraded.
- Professional photography, as long as you accept the first version looks better with it.
- Every page you might ever want. Ship the four that matter and add the rest later.
The brief that mattered was not the design one
For Korean Cosmetics the useful input had nothing to do with layout. It was the product claims. Cosmetics are regulated, so every sentence about what a cream does had to survive EU rules, in twelve languages. We rewrote all of them and pulled one product from sale entirely because an ingredient exceeded an EU limit. If you sell anything regulated, hand your designer the compliance constraints before the colour preferences. The colours can change on launch day. A claim cannot.
See the build: Korean CosmeticsWhere PROOF48 fits
PROOF48 asks for exactly one of these: the reference link, plus a line about your business. We build from that in 48 hours and you pay only if you love the result. If we need one clarification we ask it in the first reply instead of booking a call.
Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48
Building software since 2018. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, which means every opinion here was paid for in builds rather than in theory.