✦Approach
Beliefs we've had to
earn the hard way.
Eight working beliefs that survived eighteen years of shipping. Not principles for principles' sake — habits that pay dividends.
01
Design is evidence, not decoration.
Every page we ship is supposed to teach the user something about how we work. If the site doesn't demonstrate a capability, it isn't doing its job.
02
Performance is a design decision.
We treat budgets — image weight, JS payload, time-to-interactive — as creative constraints. Speed isn't optimisation; it's part of the brief.
03
Accessibility is the floor, not the ceiling.
Reduced-motion fallbacks, semantic HTML, focus states, captioned media — all shipped from the start. WCAG 2.2 AA on launch day.
04
Motion serves meaning.
Animation should clarify state, hierarchy, or causality. Anything that doesn't earn its frames doesn't get them. We measure choreography against attention, not against itself.
05
Editorial discipline before flourish.
Hierarchy, rhythm, restraint. The most expressive moments work because the surrounding pages don't fight them.
06
AI as a feature, not a frame.
We build AI where it gives the user back time or attention, never to flag a competence. The work has to stand without the AI label.
07
Senior staff in every meeting.
No three-tier handoff between the people who pitch and the people who build. The senior designer and senior engineer on your project are the same people through launch.
08
Reviewable artefacts at every phase end.
Every phase produces something you can show your board. If we can't summarise where we are on one slide, we haven't earned the milestone yet.