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.

Image — Kickoff whiteboard — 16:10

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.

Engagements start at $8,000/month. Tell us what's broken and we'll tell you honestly whether we're the right fit.

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