Let’s say you want an image-heavy site, but you don’t have a photographer or an image editor to maintain it. That’s a major constraint. So we ask if you’re willing to hire one. If you aren’t, we say we can’t design an image-heavy site. If you insist on seeing one anyway, we say no again, because we can’t propose a design solution you can’t sustain.

The most crucial thing we discover is how you work as a team. We need to know how many people actively publish to or maintain the website, and how much time they commit to it. We also need to know their skill sets. Any decent design solution takes your resources into account.

So when a client says, “We want tons of big photos,” my next question is,

Successful design projects need equal participation from the client and the designer. Yet the design process remains a mystery to the people who buy it. Design isn’t sausage. You’ll enjoy it even more if you understand how it’s made.

If you and I were to design a chair together, we’d have to consider some factors from the get-go. Of course, we’d consider the seat’s size, the height from the ground, the angle of the back, the materials, and the fabric. Before we made any of those decisions, we’d ask ourselves about the chair’s goals. Who would be using the chair? What would they

Imagine two chair shops across the street from each other. One shop takes the chair’s design into consideration from the start. They hire the best chair designer they can. The chair designer researches other chairs on the market to figure out where they’re lacking. They ask people what they like and dislike about their current chairs, research

If the project is big enough, you may have a couple of payments due at agreed-upon milestones, with a final payment on completion. I advise designers to define completion as something within their control. For example, if your designers are delivering front-end code for your internal team to implement, completion should be defined as the delivery

If someone’s complaining about legacy systems, that means they’re deep in the weeds about to start the most heinous job in web services.

Dealing with legacy systems is like swimming through maple syrup. No one’s legacy systems are in good shape. They’ve been cobbled and duct-taped together for years. The previous redesign probably entailed a quick

Once you’ve hired a designer you need to trust them to do their job. This is harder than it sounds.

Most studios, us included, insist on a deposit based on a percentage of the project before we start work. Depending on the project’s size, it could range from 25% to 50% of the total project cost. Design studios aren’t a high-margin business. Getting that money up front gives us the running room to get the project going and dedicate people to your