The brief — a scratchpad that becomes a project

Put it all down

The strip sits on the dashboard under one line: a name, a few lines, or talk. Type into it and press Enter and that’s a brief. Tap the mic and talk, and the words land in the same line for you to correct before they’re kept. Drop in a Voice Memo from your phone and it’s transcribed. Paste the email the client sent. Drop a WhatsApp export. Every one of those becomes a note on the brief, marked with how it arrived and when.

Recordings are transcribed on a server we own. The words are kept; the audio isn’t. That’s the promise the mic on every message box in Vidual already makes, and a brief keeps it.

Nothing has to be in order. A jumble is welcome. That’s because a brief is a scratchpad, and the point of a scratchpad (like the back of your hand) is that you don’t stop to think about what belongs where — you just write. A form, on the other hand (that’s a pun, you know) asks for the name, then the email, then the date, in a certain way. Real life isn’t like that.

The fields fill themselves

Open a brief and Vidual will fill in the fields above the notes if it can: who it’s for, their email and phone, the date they mentioned, the budget that came up. All of it read out of your notes. “By the end of October” becomes a date and assumes the year we’re in. “Around twelve hundred” becomes a figure. A name in the first line becomes the name at the top.

Two rules keep it sharp. A field you filled yourself is never overwritten, however many notes you add afterwards. And nothing is made up: a brief with no date in it has an empty date, and the sheet says so, because that date is worth asking for early — it becomes the project’s estimated completion.

Already a client

If the name or the email matches someone on your client list, the brief says so, with how many projects they have with you and links to the newest of them. A returning client’s history is one tap away while you’re still on the phone to them, and when the brief becomes a project it’s attached to that client rather than to a new one with the same name.

When there’s enough to quote

A project needs enough to quote, not a yes from the client. When a brief has that, Start the project opens the New Project flow with the pages the brief has already answered passed over — the name, the client, the date and the price come across — and stops on the one page a brief can’t answer, the steps. A line under the header says what came from the brief, and a tap takes you back to change any of it.

If a quote is the first piece of work, some studios might open a project on the first call, and the project is where that happens. A brief is for the other enquiries, the ones where the client is mulling, toing and froing.

It becomes the backstory

Every project in Vidual can carry a backstory: what was discussed before the project existed, read into what seems to have been decided, what is still open, and a few notes on the client. When a project starts from a brief, the backstory is read from the brief’s notes. Each line in it points at the note it came from. Tap the marker beside a line and the note opens beneath it, in your own words, so a hedged summary can always be checked against what was actually said.

The notes stay with the project. Nothing that was written down is thrown away in the reading.

And if it just sits there

A brief is a note to yourself, so nothing chases it. Left alone, it would sit for ever. So after three days untouched, the person who wrote it gets one line in the bell: the brief has waited three days — start it, drop it, or give the customer a nudge. One more at ten days, and after that it goes quiet. Adding a note resets the clock. It’s the gentlest version of a pipeline we could think of: a reminder that something might still become work, and nothing more.

Where the reading sits

There is a model doing the reading. It fills empty fields and it writes the backstory. It never puts words in front of yours: the notes are the record, the fields are a convenience, and everything it produces is hedged. If it reads a date the wrong way you change the date. If it reads nothing, the field stays empty. We wanted the technology to do a clerk’s work and then get out of the way. In our view, that is the best use of this nascent technology. In short, a little AI goes a long way.

Briefs are on the dashboard, on the Work page beside every project, and behind the + that offers a brief or a project. Every one of them is seen by your team only.