Design services that give your team something to build on

Which design service do you actually need?

The labels overlap in everyday conversation, which is why briefs often ask for the wrong thing. UX design decides what a product or site should contain and how someone moves through it. UI design decides how those screens look, feel and behave, including every state a component can be in. Website design is those two applied to a marketing site, along with the sitemap and page briefs. Graphic design covers the assets that carry your message across print and screen once the identity exists.

A quick test. If you cannot yet agree on what the site or product should do, you need UX. If that is settled but the screens look inconsistent and hard to build, you need UI and a component library. If the whole thing simply looks tired but works, a redesign scoped around the pages that carry the commercial load is usually better value than starting again. And if the problem is what your business stands for rather than how it looks, the answer sits in branding, not here.

What a design engagement looks like

Most projects run in short reviewable stages: discovery, structure, wireframes, visual direction applied to real content, then a documented system and a clickable prototype. Each stage ends with a working session rather than an emailed PDF, because the useful feedback surfaces in conversation and almost never in a comment thread.

Two things decide whether it runs smoothly. Name one decision maker, even where several people contribute opinions. And give us real content early. Layouts designed around genuine service descriptions and actual team bios survive launch. Layouts designed around placeholder text break the moment reality arrives, usually in the week you can least afford it. Timelines for most work in this category run from a fortnight for a focused asset set to roughly 4 to 8 weeks for a full website design system.

• Source files, fonts and licences transferred to you at handover
• Components documented with hover, focus, error, empty and loading states
• Colour contrast and target sizes checked to WCAG 2.2 AA while palettes are chosen
• A prototype stakeholders can walk through before development is quoted
• Written rationale for the decisions that get questioned six months later

The expensive mistake: designing pictures instead of systems

A folder of page mockups answers one question. What does this screen look like on a good day, with ideal content, on a laptop. It leaves the hard questions for the developer to invent answers to under deadline pressure. What does the comparison table do with two columns instead of five? What does the enquiry form look like after a validation error at 200 percent zoom on a 360 pixel handset?

Answering those in Figma costs an hour each. Answering them in production three weeks after launch costs a day each and is usually done badly. The other version of this mistake is buying bespoke design you do not need. If nobody in your organisation has requested a new page in two years, a full tokenised system is over engineering and we would rather you spent that money on content or on copy that says something. We will say so during scoping.