Creative director — brief, taste, acceptance criteria

Small web projects usually fail on intent, not technology. Nobody agreed what "done" meant.

In this course you are the creative director — even as a team of one. Your IDE and AI tools are instruments. The brief is the score.

Module 06, Lesson 01 walks you through the full one-page brief for your capstone. Here you learn the idea in one sitting.

The one sentence to keep

Tools amplify direction. Clear direction produces useful output faster. Vague direction produces confident nonsense faster.

What a brief answers (minimum)

• Goal — What outcome should the page support?
• Audience — Who visits, and what do they already know?
• Scope — How many pages? What is in and out?
• Tone — Pick words a teammate would recognise (friendly, formal, plain…).
• Definition of done — What would you check before saying "ship"?

Acceptance criteria turn "looks good" into checks you can run: one <h1>, contact visible on a phone, images have alt text. You will refine these in later modules.

Vague vs useful (30 seconds)

Weak: "Make a website for my hobby."

Stronger:

Goal: Help neighbours book a 1-hour intro for a community garden club.
Audience: Adults in my suburb; many use phones.
Scope: One scrolling page — intro, meeting times, map link, email. No login.
Done means: A new visitor finds when and where within 30 seconds on a phone.

Paste the stronger version into an AI tool or hand it to a designer. Same task, less random rework.

Do this — five-bullet sketch (10 minutes)

Draft a five-bullet brief for a fictional micro-site (hobby you do not do, or a dream landing page):

1. Audience
2. Scope
3. Tone
4. Must-haves
5. Definition of done

Read it aloud. If you stumble, your visitor might too.

Keep this draft — you will expand it into the full template in Module 06.

What's next

Next up: Hand-coding, AI-first, and hybrid paths