Many authors have argued that establishing the design specification, a design requirement list, before beginning design leads to a better understanding of the solution possibilities and better design solutions. Typically, industrial design begins with a narrative-form brief, in which design requirements are embedded implicitly. This paper describes a study designed to investigate how the explicit representation of design brief requirements influences designers' behaviour and the quality of the design solution. The results suggest that it does matter how design brief requirements are represented and presented to designers. The explicit representation of design brief requirements in the form of a checklist encouraged increased voicing of those requirements and their increased implicit consideration in solution and evaluation focused utterances. Furthermore, overall, the designers with access to the checklist judged their solutions to be a better match with the design brief requirements than those without the checklist.