A creative brief is the answer to 'what are we building, and why?' Every working design project starts with one. When the client gives you a vague request, your job is to write the brief they should have given you.

Every brief — written, rewritten, or interrogated out of an unwilling client — answers five questions:

1. Purpose. What does this image need to do? Inform, persuade, decorate, announce, recruit, sell? Be specific.
2. Audience. Who is this for? Not 'everyone.' One person. Age, context, what they're already looking at when this lands in front of them.
3. Audience needs. What does the audience need to understand, feel, or do as a result of seeing this image?
4. Output specifications. Where will it appear? Print poster? Social post? Email banner? Each medium has dimensions, file format, and color-mode constraints.
5. Accessibility requirements. Color contrast for low-vision viewers, alt-text for screen readers, type sizes that work at distance.

If your audience is 'everyone', your design is for no one. The single most useful exercise in design is writing a one-line audience persona — a sentence describing one real human who represents the audience you're trying to reach.

Examples of personas that work:

• '17-year-old skateboarder, mostly TikTok, doesn't trust ads, cares about local crews.'
• '42-year-old parent of a 9-year-old soccer player, scans a flyer at the rink for under 8 seconds, needs the date and the cost in 2 seconds.'
• 'College freshman picking a club at orientation, overwhelmed by 80 tables, drawn to anything visual.'

Each persona implies design decisions. The skater post will use a brutalist or hand-drawn aesthetic. The parent flyer will lead with date and cost in 80-point type. The club table will use a single bold image plus a 4-word tagline. The audience writes half your brief.

Every visual decision is checked against seven principles. You don't apply them sequentially — you apply them simultaneously, all at once, every time you choose to scale something, color something, place something, or leave whitespace around something.

• Contrast. Difference. Big vs small, light vs dark, color vs gray. Contrast creates emphasis.
• Hierarchy. Visual rank. What does the viewer see first? Second? Third? Hierarchy is intentional contrast applied to direct attention.
• Alignment. Edges and centers that line up. Strong alignment = perceived structure. Weak alignment = perceived randomness.
• Repetition. Repeated visual elements (a color, a shape, a typeface) tie a composition together and across deliverables.
• Balance. Visual weight distributed across the composition. Symmetric balance = formal. Asymmetric balance = dynamic.
• White space. Empty space is not waste — it's the silence that makes the rest readable.
• Color. Hue, saturation, brightness. Color theory deserves its own course, but for now: pick a small palette and use it consistently.

Three sources of imagery are safe for your work: your own original photography/illustration, licensed stock, and public domain / Creative Commons assets with appropriate license. Everything else is a takedown notice waiting to happen.

Copyright is automatic the moment a creator records their work. You don't need to register it. You can't 'use the photo because there's no copyright symbol' — there's no symbol because copyright doesn't require one.

Public domain means copyright has expired, been waived, or never applied. Government works (e.g., NASA imagery, USDA photos) are public domain. Pre-1928 works are public domain in the US. Wikimedia Commons hosts many public-domain images — but you must verify the license per file, not assume.

Creative Commons is a license system. The most permissive (CC0) waives all rights. The next most permissive (CC BY) requires attribution. Then comes CC BY-SA (attribution + share-alike), CC BY-NC (attribution + non-commercial only — this rules out most client work), CC BY-ND (no derivatives), and combinations. Read the license text. Each tag changes what you can do.

Adobe Stock ships two main license tiers:

• Standard. Most uses. Up to 500,000 print impressions or unlimited digital uses. No merchandise (T-shirts, mugs) for resale.
• Extended. Unlocks merchandise, larger print runs, broadcast uses. Substantially more expensive.

Every placed asset goes in a log. One row per asset. Columns: asset title, URL or file path, creator name, license type (CC0, CC BY, Adobe Stock Standard, original work, etc.), allowed uses, attribution required?, and where the asset appears in your file.

The log does two things. First, it forces you to verify licensing before placing the asset — you cannot fake a license row. Second, it's your defense document if anyone ever questions a usage. A complete log answers the question 'where did you get this?' for every pixel.

By Week 9, you'll have logged 40+ assets. The habit compounds. By Week 18, you can hand a client a complete source log with the final files — a professionalism signal that separates trained designers from amateurs.

The 17 terms from this week, ready for flashcards. The Vocab Match quiz in the Wrap Up chunk tests recognition of all of them.