Professional design practice regards articulating design brief as an important step to begin a design project. Typically, the initial brief is given by the client to the designer/architect who may evolve the brief through several meetings with the client. Earlier research studies to understand design thinking have looked at the work of the designer with focus on ‘conceptualization in design’ with very few studies done to see the process of arriving at design briefs. This study aims to look at the process of clarifying design briefs in professional design practice. Our hypothesis is that a lot of early ideas for design solutions are established in the process of creating these design briefs. Designers from domains like Product, Interaction, Communication, Furniture and Architecture were interviewed in a semi-structured format, to understand the evolution of design briefs in their practices. In this study, it is observed that, designers set parameters in the briefing process itself which directs further design explorations and they tend to focus on primary generators in the design brief itself. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017.