What makes a good art brief?

The best brief for an art commission I ever received was two sentences. The worst was four pages.

I've commissioned artists for major brands, flagship retail spaces and offices over the past ten years, and the projects that produce work people genuinely respond to almost always start the same way…

The client trusts the artist.

Not blindly, but enough to say, “here's the space, here's the feeling we're going for, here's the world we live in. Now show us what you'd do with that.”

The briefs that don't work do the opposite.

They describe the exact scene they want painted.

The colours. The references. Sometimes, a Pinterest board that's already halfway to a finished image. The artist has basically been told what to make before the conversation's even started.

What comes back is technically accurate and completely dead.

The commissions I'm most proud of happened when a Venn diagram actually overlapped. The brand's aesthetic and the artist's authentic practice met naturally, rather than one being forced to imitate the other.

When we worked with HUGO BOSS on a series of store commissions, their brief was essentially this:

Here's our world, find an artist who already lives somewhere near it and let them work.

The result looked completely at home in the space.
It also looked unmistakably like the artist who made it.
Both things were true at the same time, and that's what you're aiming for.

When it goes wrong, you get something that matches the sofas, doesn't offend anyone, and the artist removes it from their portfolio later.

If you're designing or refreshing a space and thinking about commissioning artwork, the question worth starting with isn't what you want it to look like…

It's who already makes work that belongs in this environment, and how you can leave them to do what they do best.

PS. This is exactly what we help with. Drop me a message if you're working on something.