Writes the art direction brief every production job starts from - a fixed core of 3-5 frozen constants, 3-5 designed flex variables, camera-level operational constraints instead of adjectives, reference anchors instead of re-described prose, at least 3 do/don't pairs, and a banned-moves list - so ten makers or models converge on one world. Use when someone asks "write an art direction brief for this campaign", "define what never changes across our launch assets", "turn this moodboard into rules a photographer or image model can follow", "we need a brief before we start generating campaign imagery", or before any multi-asset creative production begins. Do NOT use to create the brand identity system itself - use brand-guidelines instead; for a logo design brief, use logo-brief-writer; for checking finished assets against a brief, use campaign-coherence-review.
---
name: art-direction-brief-writer
description: Writes the art direction brief every production job starts from - a fixed core of 3-5 frozen constants, 3-5 designed flex variables, camera-level operational constraints instead of adjectives, reference anchors instead of re-described prose, at least 3 do/don't pairs, and a banned-moves list - so ten makers or models converge on one world. Use when someone asks "write an art direction brief for this campaign", "define what never changes across our launch assets", "turn this moodboard into rules a photographer or image model can follow", "we need a brief before we start generating campaign imagery", or before any multi-asset creative production begins. Do NOT use to create the brand identity system itself - use brand-guidelines instead; for a logo design brief, use logo-brief-writer; for checking finished assets against a brief, use campaign-coherence-review.
---
# art-direction-brief-writer
Multi-asset work drifts by default: prose re-described is re-interpreted every time, by every maker and every model. The brief is the upstream fix - one page that freezes what never changes and licenses what may flex, written in constraints a camera or a diffusion model could obey. Without it, every downstream review has nothing to check against, and the campaign's tenth asset belongs to a different company than its first.
## Operating procedure
The steps run in dependency order: forks before constants, because a brief cannot freeze what the brand has not decided; constants before flex, because flex is defined as everything the core does not claim; constraints and references before do/don't pairs, because the pairs are rendered from the rules as their enforcement face.
### Step 1: Elicit the campaign and the decided world
Paste the charter block if one exists. If the client has a charter but the foundations pack is not installed, elicit the needed values directly and label them provisional. If no charter exists at all, halt and route to premium-design-foundations - never substitute worked-example values. The charter core values are forks, accent, canvas and ink, radius, weight set, motion bands. Then gather:
- **Campaign** name and the full asset manifest.
- **Forks** - the brand's three fork decisions (pill vs rectangle, Track A vs Track B, playful vs precise). If any fork is undecided, stop and route it to premium-design-foundations; a brief cannot freeze what the brand has not decided.
- **Tokens** already decided: accent, canvas, type ramp, motion bands.
- **References** on hand: style refs, style-reference codes, shot sets, named prior assets.
- **Signature move**, if the brand has named one - it must be nameable in one sentence without an "and".
- **Channels** in production (photo, CGI, generated imagery, motion), because the constraint block must speak each channel's control surface.
If a number is a guess, label it a guess and move on.