Build it
Make it sell
Keep it running
Brand & shop
Both halves, by the same two people.
Most companies hire design and development separately. It is a reasonable decision, and everything that falls into the gap between the two is what this page is about.
The usual arrangement
Two agencies, and a gap between them.
Nobody plans this badly. It happens because the person who decided and the person who builds have never spoken to each other.
The design agency
Delivers a brand: logo, colours, type, a guide. Often beautifully done — and finished at the moment the files are handed over.
The web agency
Receives the files and builds a shop. Discovers what does not survive contact with a browser, improvises, and does not call the designer about it.
What falls in
- Colours that fail contrast the moment they become text on a background
- A logo never drawn at sixteen pixels, so the favicon ends up a grey blob
- Type licensed for print but not for the web, discovered in week five
- Packaging photographed for the shelf and unusable on a product page
- A brand guide nobody updates once the site starts drifting away from it
None of it is anybody’s fault, and all of it is expensive. The web agency bills for solving it, the design agency was not asked, and the result is a shop that is nearly on-brand — which is the same as being nearly on time. Our half of that problem is on the design and services pages; this page is about not having the problem.
How it works instead
Every file is made for what happens next.
Left is what Bianca delivers. Right is what it becomes, without anyone rebuilding it or approximating it.
- A colour system with print and screen values
- Which becomes the shop’s actual variables rather than a set of approximations somebody matched by eye. The contrast was checked while the palette was being drawn, not after the site was built.
- A mark drawn for sixteen pixels and three metres
- Which becomes the favicon, the app icon and the header without being redrawn by a developer at eleven at night. The format ladder exists for exactly this reason.
- Type with its licences already sorted
- Which is installed as a web font that is genuinely licensed for the web — a question that otherwise surfaces in week five, after everything has been designed around it.
- Packaging artwork
- Which is photographed once, for the shelf and for the product page at the same time, in a session planned by the person who designed the packaging.
- A brand guide
- Which describes a site that actually exists, because it was finished after the site rather than before it. Your team can then keep both consistent instead of watching them drift apart.
- One person who decided all of it
- Who is still reachable in year three when you add a product line, and who does not need the reasoning explained back to her. That is the part no process replaces — see who we are.
The second half of a combined project is cheaper than the same work commissioned separately, because nobody has to reverse-engineer the first half. That is not a discount we offer — it is simply work that does not have to happen.
The offer
One conversation, one price, one date.
There is no handover because there is nobody to hand over to. We have worked together for twenty years and we sit in the same room, which means the brand decisions are made by someone who knows what the shop has to do with them, and the shop is built by someone who was in the conversation. One written concept covers both halves, and it has one price and one delivery date at the bottom of it.
Starting from nothing, or starting again?
Both work. If a brand already exists we will tell you honestly whether it needs replacing or only needs finishing — and finishing is usually the answer, which is the cheaper one.