A creative intake form is a structured questionnaire a client or internal stakeholder fills in before a project kicks off. It is the front door to your process, and a good one prevents the single most common source of delay: starting work, then stopping repeatedly to chase information that should have been captured up front.
Why an intake form beats a kickoff call
Kickoff calls are useful, but memory is not a system. Details discussed on a call get misremembered, half-noted, or lost entirely. An intake form forces the important questions to be answered in writing, gives you a record to refer back to, and — crucially — makes the client do the thinking before the project starts rather than halfway through it.
What to include on the form
The essentials: contact and decision-maker details, the project goal, the audience, the deliverables and specifications, brand assets and guidelines, mandatory constraints, references and examples they like, the deadline, and the budget. The most valuable question is often the simplest: who has final approval? Knowing that on day one prevents a nasty surprise on the last day.
Keeping it short enough to finish
Intake forms fail when they are so long nobody completes them. Every field you add lowers the completion rate, so be ruthless: ask only what genuinely changes how you will approach the work. If a question would not alter what you produce or how you produce it, cut it. You can always follow up on the details that emerge.
Connecting intake to the rest of your workflow
The intake form is step one of a chain that runs through the brief, the work, the review, and the approval. The information you capture here should feed straight into the design brief and set expectations for how feedback and sign-off will work. When intake, review, and approval are joined up, a project moves from enquiry to delivery without anyone having to reconstruct what was agreed.
“The single most valuable question on any intake form is the simplest: who has final approval? Knowing that on day one prevents the most expensive surprise on the last day.”
Creative intake form fields
- Contact and decision-maker details
- Project goal and audience
- Deliverables and specifications
- Brand assets, guidelines, and constraints
- References and examples they like
- Deadline and budget
- Who has final approval
Frequently asked questions
What is a creative intake form?
A creative intake form is a structured questionnaire a client or stakeholder completes before a project starts, capturing the goal, audience, deliverables, brand assets, constraints, budget, and who approves. It prevents mid-project delays caused by missing information.
What should be on a creative intake form?
Contact and decision-maker details, the project goal and audience, deliverables and specs, brand assets and constraints, references, the deadline and budget, and — most importantly — who has final approval.
How is an intake form different from a brief?
The intake form captures raw information from the client at the start; the brief is the aligned document you produce from it. Intake gathers; the brief synthesises and sets the shared direction everyone agrees to.
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