Flyers and posters come back in one to three days. The jobs that take a fortnight are almost never the design — they are the waiting. Here is what a brief needs to contain on day one, in the order it actually blocks things.
1. The one thing the flyer has to achieve
Not "awareness". A sentence with a verb and an object: get people to come to the programme on Saturday, get them to WhatsApp a number, get them to bring the coupon. Everything else in the layout is argued from this. A flyer that is trying to do three things does none of them, and the designer cannot tell you which one to cut — you can.
2. The words, in the order they matter
Write the copy as a list ranked by importance, not as a paragraph. Date, venue, price, the phone number, the name of whoever is hosting. If a line is "for context, cut it if it is tight", say so — that sentence saves an exchange.
The number on a flyer is the number someone will dial at 11pm from a bus. Put the WhatsApp line on it, not the one nobody answers.
3. Size, quantity and stock, before the design starts
An A5 that was designed at A4 gets re-laid-out, not resized: the type stops being legible at half the size and the safe margins change. The paper changes what the colours can do, and a 5,000-run is priced and ganged differently from a 300-run.
If you do not know the size, say so and say what it is for — pinned on a wall, handed out by hand, posted in a WhatsApp group. Each one has a normal answer and you should not have to guess.
4. What must appear exactly as it is
A logo file, not a screenshot of a logo. A photo of the venue, of the product, of the person speaking. A registered name and spelling. A sponsor's mark with its own rules about clear space. Anything you would be embarrassed to see wrong is worth sending up front, because those are the items nobody can invent for you.
If the only logo you have is a JPEG off the website, say so early — it can often be rebuilt, but that is a different job and a different day.
5. The deadline, and what it is really attached to
"Friday" means different things to a printer and to a client. Say what happens on Friday: the press runs, the venue is booked, the pastor announces it from the pulpit. A deadline with a reason behind it can be planned around; a bare date cannot, and the first thing that gets cut when the two collide is usually the round of revisions you wanted most.
What the revisions look like when they go well
Send feedback as one message with numbered points, not six messages as they occur to you. "Make the number bigger" is a direction; "I cannot read this from two metres" is better, because it tells the designer what the object has to survive.
Anything you can answer with a yes or a no, answer. Anything you can attach a picture to, attach it. Three numbered points come back the same day; eleven scattered ones come back as a question, and a question is a day.
The honest version of the timeline
Brief with all five items in the morning, first layout the same day or the next. Two rounds of corrections inside a day if the answers arrive together. Press file, source file and a printed proof after that. That is the one to three days the FAQ promises — and the reason the same job can take two weeks is never the design.
Send the brief as it sits in your head. A free consultation and a clear quote come back the same day, and an honest yes or no on the deadline with it.