Create design tasks from a campaign brief
Each brief becomes a Design team issue in the right project, with the campaign context already in the description.
New submission on your "Submit a brief" form
Create an issue in your Design team with the brief details in the description, a "design" label, and the project set from a form field
One-directional. A submission triggers the action — nothing is written back into your form.
Design requests that begin as a conversation arrive missing the deadline, the audience, or the list of deliverables. A brief form asks for all three before anything reaches the queue, and the submission becomes an issue designers can start from rather than negotiate over.
In-house marketing teams working alongside one or two designers gain the most. The campaign name decides which Linear project the work belongs to, so a quarter's requests stay grouped together instead of scattering across one shared backlog.
Setting it up
- 1
Set up Linear projects that match the campaigns your marketing team actually runs, and add a design label to the Design team.
- 2
Publish the brief form and make the campaign name a dropdown of those project names rather than free text — exact string matching is what makes the routing work.
- 3
In Zapier, choose formformform's New Submission trigger and select the brief form.
- 4
Add Linear's Create Issue action, set the team to Design, and map Campaign Name to the Project field.
- 5
Build the issue title from the campaign name and the deliverables, so the board reads as a list of things to make rather than a list of campaigns.
- 6
Write the description from the objective, then the campaign detail, then the audience, in that order — a designer should read the goal before the specifics.
- 7
Map Brief Approval Deadline to the issue's due date, and add the channel list to the description, since channels decide the sizes and formats needed.
- 8
Set Labels to design, run a test brief, check it lands in the right project with a due date, then turn the Zap on.
What maps where
Using the Marketing Brief Form as the starting point. These are its real fields — swap in your own and the mapping works the same way.
| Form field | Linear |
|---|---|
| Campaign Name | Linear project the issue is filed against |
| Key Deliverables | Issue title, and a checklist in the description |
| Campaign Objective | Issue description, opening line |
| Target Audience | Issue description, who the work is for |
| Marketing Channels | Issue description, decides formats and sizes |
| Brief Approval Deadline | Issue due date |
Variations worth knowing
A brief asking for a landing page, three banners and an email is a single issue by default. Add a Zapier looping step over the deliverables list to create a separate Linear issue for each, all in the same project, so progress shows per asset.
Add an approval question to the form and filter on it in Zapier, so only signed-off briefs reach Linear. Everything else waits in your responses list, and the Design team's project shows committed work rather than every idea a marketer has had.
If something isn't arriving
Linear matches projects by exact name, so a campaign typed as "Q3 Launch" will not find a project called "Q3 launch". Build the form's campaign field as a dropdown from your real project names, and update it whenever you create a project.
Add the missing question to the form, not to the issue. Conditional logic can show format and size questions only when the channel list includes paid social, so the brief gets longer for the requests that need it and stays short otherwise.
Frequently asked questions
How many questions should a brief form ask?
Enough that a designer never has to come back with a follow-up, and no more. Fifteen questions is a lot to face in one go, so use conditional logic to show the budget and channel detail only for paid work and keep simple asset requests short.
Can people outside the company submit a brief?
Yes. Share the form by link or embed it on an intranet page, and agencies or freelancers can send briefs the same way staff do. The issue is created under your account in the Design team, and they never see the tracker itself.
Can the requester see when their brief is picked up?
Not through the form. The connection creates the issue and stops there, with nothing sent back. If requesters need visibility, invite them to the Linear project as guests, or post the week's accepted briefs in your marketing channel instead.
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Build the form first
The automation needs somewhere to fire from. Publish a form, connect it once, and every submission from then on runs this flow.
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