NotesAPR 09, 20264 min
The brief is usually wrong, and that is fine
Manufacturers ask for a website. What they need is the thing underneath it working. Saying so early is the whole job.
Most of what goes wrong with a project brief is decided long before anyone opens a design file. The decision gets made in a procurement call, or in a template, or by whoever owned the site three vendors ago — and then everybody downstream spends two years working around it.
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What the buyer is actually doing
A buyer configuring a boat is not browsing. They are building the thing they intend to own, and they will do it four or five times across two weeks, usually on a phone, usually while comparing against a competitor's PDF. Every second of load time is a chance for them to stop.
Nobody abandons a configurator because it was ugly. They abandon it because it did not answer the question they came with.
Where the weight goes
Geometry, textures, and the same hull exported four times by four different people. The fix is boring: one pipeline, one export budget, and a rule that nothing ships to production without going through it.
- Asset payload, before
- 136 MB
- Asset payload, after
- 4.6 MB
- Models in pipeline
- 18
- LCP, mobile
- 1.9 s
What we'd do differently
Start with the constraint. Decide the payload budget, the deadline, and who owns the export before anyone argues about lighting. Everything after that is production, and production is the easy part.
07 — Contact
If your team can't build it and your last agency didn't, let's talk.
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