One photo into six formats: how to write a brief that holds

The reason one good photograph turns into six mediocre assets is almost never the generation. It is the brief. A brief that describes the picture produces one picture stretched six ways; a brief that describes the job produces six images that happen to share a product.

The difference is structural, and it can be written down once and reused.

The four parts of a brief that works

1. The subject, unambiguously. The product, its real material, its real size relative to something known. This part never changes between formats.
2. The setting — where it is, what time of day, what surface, what is nearby. This is the part you vary.
3. The composition — where the product sits in frame and how much empty space surrounds it. This is where formats actually differ.
4. The exclusions. No text, no people, no competing brands, no hands. The list of things that must not appear does more work than the description of what should.

Composition is about safe areas, not aesthetics

• Square, 1:1 — product centred, generous margin. This is the one that gets cropped least and reused most.
• Story, 9:16 — product in the middle third. The top and bottom sixths are covered by interface on most surfaces, and anything important there is gone.
• Email header, roughly 3:1 — product off-centre, with deliberate empty space on one side for a headline.
• Landscape ad, 1.91:1 — the widest crop and the one most likely to cut a tall product in half.
• Category tile, 4:5 — product filling more of the frame, because it is small on screen.

Brief each of these as its own composition instruction with the same subject text. Not as "the same image, resized".

Keeping six outputs looking like one campaign

Consistency comes from fixing the things that are easy to fix and varying only one:

1. Fix the light. One time of day and one direction across all six. Mixed lighting is what makes a set look assembled rather than shot.
2. Fix the palette. Two or three colours, named, drawn from your brand rather than chosen per image.
3. Fix the surface and material vocabulary — oak, linen, brushed steel. Reuse the same words.
4. Vary the framing only. If you also vary the setting per format you have six campaigns, not one.

Reviewing six at once

Check them as a set, in the order they will actually be seen, not one at a time in a folder.

• The product is identical in all six. Same colour, same label, same proportions. A drift in any of these is the tell that they were generated separately.
• Nothing important sits in a crop zone. Overlay the safe areas and look.
• Text is real text, added afterwards. Generated lettering is the most visible failure in this whole workflow.
• Prices and claims come from the shop, not from the image. A price baked into a picture is a price that will be wrong.

Write the briefs once and keep them

The formats do not change between campaigns. The setting does. So the useful artefact is a small library of format briefs — six entries, each with its composition and safe-area rules — into which you drop this month's subject and setting.

That turns a campaign's image work from a creative exercise into filling in two fields, which is the only version of this that survives contact with a shop that also has to answer support emails.