The Best FREE Briefbox Alternatives to Practice Design
What is BriefBox?
Practice briefs for graphic or logo design can be very helpful for designers to build up their portfolio, especially for beginning designers. Briefbox is one of the most well-known websites providing practice briefs for designers. Briefbox offers various design exercises for people that just want to practice their design skills and they offer various design briefs sorted by category and difficulty. You can also post your designs after you’ve finished one of the exercises. They also have their own “resource center” with resources like guides and tutorials. Briefbox is a great way to get into practicing logo design with fake client briefs but it also has a few cons. If you want lots of practice using design briefs, briefbox can be very limiting. Offering only 6 briefs on their free plan, it can be hard to get enough practice.
Briefbox’s paid plans are a great option for experienced designers who are willing to pay more to get more design practice on practice briefs. For less experienced and starting designers, however, paid plans can often be an obstacle that gets in the way of their path to learning more about design.
Design brief generators like FakeClients are a great alternative to Briefbox as they can provide an infinite number of design briefs to practice on. FakeClients.com is free for everyone that uses it and doesn’t limit the number of briefs you can practice your design skills with.
FakeClients Generated Client Briefs and feedback
FakeClients.com is a free design brief generator that you can use to generate an infinite number of randomly generated design briefs. The fact that these briefs are randomly generated means you’ll never get the same brief twice. A downside to this is that the briefs are less detailed than those of briefbox but you could also use that to challenge yourself to be more creative. The briefs often don’t give you a lot of directions regarding the design specifications, which is something that may happen to you in your professional design career as well. You’ll need to come up with creative ideas entirely by yourself, which makes this a great way to practice these skills.
FakeClients now also has a dedicated section for design feedback. It’s an easy way to post your designs and give feedback on other designers' work. It is free to register via FakeClients.com/feedback
FakeClients Written Client Briefs
FakeClients doesn’t only offer a client brief generator but has recently started offering more detailed, written client briefs just like briefbox but more in the form of a real brief. These briefs are more realistic to work with and provide more practice. For beginners, however, these briefs can be a bit intimidating at first so we recommend to start out with the generated briefs and using your imagination to come up with the details.
/Brief
/Brief is a brief generator for branding, illustration, packaging, and logo design with lots of different combinations. The briefs are less in the form of a ‘brief’ like those of briefbox or fakeclients and more in the form of a checklist of various specifications regarding the project. It’s great that you can select all the different specifications yourself but it makes it less realistic than a brief you’d get in real life where you wouldn’t know what your next design brief is going to be about.
Briefz.biz
Briefz is a very simple generator that generates design project ideas. It gives you one line which describes the project to you. It can be very helpful for starting designers as you can be as creative as you want but it is less comparable to real-life briefs. It’s also helpful if you’ve already gone through all the design briefs on other sites because thanks to the simplicity, these sites can generate way more design practice briefs. Although, they can’t really be called briefs as they simply state the subject of your design.
Sharpen.design
Sharpen.design is much like Briefz. It provides you with one line in which a design project is described. It is very simple but offers 1+ million combinations. Sharpen.design has briefs for things like branding, marketing, and UI/UX. It’s probably one of the best-looking design brief generators but it is also a bit too simple with only giving you a vague subject for which you should design something. It’s also very similar to Briefz.biz, so be sure to try them both out and see which one you like best.
Good brief
From the same creator of the /brief design brief generator, Good brief essentially is a better-looking and easier-to-use version of the /brief design brief generator. Before using Good brief, check out /brief and see which one you like best.
Daily design challenges
Another great when is to practice your design skills using a challenge. This way you force yourself to design something every day for a set amount of days. The way these challenges work is that you receive a design brief every day in your email inbox for 20 to 100 days. These design challenges come in many different themes like daily logo design, daily UX, and daily UI. They are also very popular with some having over 100.000 users of which also many designers from big companies.
Design jobs
There are many websites that let people post their design jobs for designers to apply for. These jobs can be as simple as “design X for X brand” but there are also many details briefs from businesses that need to have something designed for their business. A great practice exercise is to go around on these sites and find interesting requests you’d want to work on. Act as if these are your clients and design according to their brief. If you like your work, you can even send it to them and they may like it as well. They may even contact you for design jobs in the future.
