PortSpace.ioA brief that reads the client’s material into a plan
Every project begins as a pile: emails, a Pinterest board, five product links, photos of the space, notes from the first meeting. The brief is where that pile becomes a plan — read by the assistant, checked by the designer, and turned into the project’s setup and first specifications without anyone retyping a word of it.
Paste it as it came
The owner’s email, the walkthrough notes, a forwarded thread, a voice memo’s transcript. Add the product links the client pasted with what they said about each, and drop in pictures — inspiration and photos of the existing space alike; the assistant tells the two apart.
Read into the portal’s own words
One read gives a summary; the areas, and the repeated rooms in each with counts; every requirement with its source — "owner’s email", "image 2", a link — so the designer can check it; the client’s dislikes in their own words; a palette and materials; and the questions still open, wherever the material is silent or contradicts itself. It never invents a count, a price or a product. And it is the designer’s to correct: Edit the brief turns every section into fields — a room count, a requirement’s wording, a color — saved with the corrector’s name, and the concepts are drafted from the corrected version.
Links become library entries, pictures get captions
Each product page the client pasted becomes a draft entry in your library — details and picture — marked as from this brief with what the client said. Each picture keeps a one-line description under it, so "image 3" means something later.
A brief for every area
The read sorts the pile by area: what holds for the whole project — no brass anywhere, the opening date — and a brief for the Lobby, the Guestrooms, the Restaurant, each with its own requirements, palette, budget and questions. They are the project’s areas, so adding one here puts it in Specify too; the restaurant package that arrives in month three is read into its area alone. And if you choose, the client reads each area as “what we heard” before anything is specified.
Concepts, library-first
Draft two or three directions for an area that genuinely differ: a name, a paragraph, a palette, materials, and ten to twenty items, each saying why it answers the area’s brief. Items come first from what the client’s links became, then from what your firm has specified on past projects, then the rest of your library — and only as marked, unpriced ideas beyond that, when you allow it (on from the start while your library is small, and it says so).
Your prices, not the assistant’s
Every item is priced from your own records — the product’s sell price, or its cost through your markup rules, or list price marked as such. A concept shows its total and how many items are still unpriced, so a direction can be judged against the budget before anything is specified.
Take one into the project
Trim a draft — a quantity here, an item dropped there — then take it in: a specification per item with an item number in the area’s habit, its product, quantity and price; takeoff rows for repeated rooms; a swatch board of the pictured items. The concept’s card then offers Propose these items to the client, which drafts the proposal from exactly those specifications — so the client’s first email becomes the client’s first signature without a line retyped. From there the project runs as any other: approvals, the orders, the invoices.
Counted, and it says so
A read spends one AI action plus one per link; a draft of concepts spends one. The page states the cost and the month’s usage before it starts, and administrators can switch the Brief section off under Settings → Work → Modules.
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