Design Request Form Template
Creative intake that protects the design team — a real brief, sizes and formats, deadline firmness, and brand assets attached before work begins.
Need something designed? The brief below is short but honest work — a complete one buys you fewer revision rounds and a faster first draft.
Logos, approved copy, reference pieces — everything the first draft starts from.
Design teams do not drown in work; they drown in re-work. The banner built for the wrong audience, the deck rebuilt because the copy changed, the file re-exported because nobody said "print" — each is a request that arrived incomplete and got completed by expensive iteration. A design request form is the studio's fence: work starts when the brief is whole, and this template defines whole.
Why these fields. The deliverable selector sets the production path — social graphics, landing pages, print, decks, and brand assets are different crafts with different checklists, and knowing which one this is determines who takes it and how long it takes. The creative brief is the load-bearing field, and its structure is the classic minimum: audience, message, must-haves. "Make it pop" fails all three; "ops managers should feel this is finally simple, logo and legal line non-negotiable" is a brief a designer can open a file against. Sizes and formats get a dedicated field because dimension surprises are the most preventable rework in the discipline — the placeholder even demonstrates print's bleed requirement, the classic omission. The due date and the firmness question work as a pair, and the firmness options are politely radical: teams that may say "whenever it's great" say it more often than cynics expect, and every such answer buys the hard deadlines room to be real. The asset upload takes up to five files at 10MB — logos, approved copy, reference pieces — so the first draft starts from materials, not from a hunt.
What we left out. Revision-count contracts and hour estimates — those are conversations between people, and forms that legislate them read as hostile. Also style questionnaires ("pick five adjectives"): inspiration files say more than adjective grids ever have.
Who uses this. In-house studios serving many departments, marketing teams with one overloaded designer, agencies structuring internal traffic, and freelancers who send this to retainer clients before every engagement.
Make it yours. Rename deliverable lanes to your menu, and give each lane its own follow-up with logic rules — landing-page requests can reveal a URL field, print requests a quantity-and-stock question. Push accepted briefs by webhook into your project tracker so the queue lives where the work does. Export the CSV quarterly and count requests by team and type: that distribution is the staffing argument, and the firmness column shows who cries wolf.
The brief is the deadline. A complete brief on Monday beats a rush order on Thursday every time. This form exists to make Monday the norm — share its link in the channel where design requests currently ambush you, and let the fence do its quiet work.
Frequently asked questions
What can requesters attach to a brief?
Up to five files at 10MB each — logos, approved copy documents, reference designs. Files arrive attached to the request, so the studio never chases assets by email.
How do we handle competing deadlines?
The firmness question does the sorting: hard, event-tied dates schedule first, and "whenever it's great" answers create the slack that absorbs genuine rushes.
Can different deliverables ask different follow-ups?
Yes — add logic rules per lane in the editor, like revealing a page-URL field only for landing-page requests. Every other requester sees the shorter form.
Can requests flow into our project management tool?
Add a webhook and each brief POSTs to your tool the moment it arrives, signed for verification, with the deliverable type and due date in the payload.