Design runs from day 4 to day 12. What comes out of it is a system: type, colour, spacing, and a set of components that every page gets assembled from. Build those parts once and pages stay consistent, the build goes faster, and adding a page next year doesn’t mean starting over.
Designing pages one at a time feels productive and quietly makes a mess. One button style on the homepage, another on the pricing page, and six months later nobody remembers which is right. A system settles those choices once.
What we design
We start from the discovery map, so the pages and their arguments are already decided. Now we work out how it looks and holds together.
The core kit. Type scale, colour, spacing, and the base components: buttons, cards, headers, forms. This is the vocabulary every page is written in.
Hierarchy, page by page. What the eye lands on first, second, third. Visitors decide in seconds whether to stay, so the most important thing has to be the most visible.
Real words in place. We design with the actual copy from discovery, never lorem ipsum. Placeholder text hides the fact that most of a page is words, and a layout that only works with fake text doesn’t work at all. The copywriting note covers how we handle the words.
One review, done properly
You review the full design before we write any code. The timing is deliberate. A layout change costs an hour in a design file and a day once it’s built, so we settle everything while it’s still cheap.
Which means we ask for real feedback here, not a quick thumbs up. If a section feels off, now is the time to say so. Once we’re in Build, the design is the spec, and changing the spec mid-build is where timelines slip.
Why it pays off later
The system earns its keep after launch. You’ll want to add a case study, a service page, a campaign landing page. Because the components already exist and already agree with each other, that’s a few hours of work, not a fresh design project. The site grows with you instead of ageing the day it ships.
With the design signed off, we build: clean code, speed, and being found by search and answer engines. That’s the Build phase.
Quick recall
What does design produce? A reusable system of type, colour, spacing, and components, plus the pages built from it.
Why a system? Consistency, faster builds, and cheap new pages after launch.
Why review before code? Changes are cheap in a design file and expensive in code.
What’s the payoff? New pages later take hours because the parts already exist.
Written by 4080 Studio.
