How I Work
Every project follows a deliberate three-phase arc. No skipping the hard questions, no designing in a vacuum, no launching without measurement. Here's the full process, unfiltered.
Honest assessment before a single pixel moves. What's broken, what's missing, and what's actually needed.
Most designers skip this phase. They jump straight to mood boards and logo sketches because it's fun. But design without diagnosis is decoration. The critique phase is where I tear apart the existing situation — the brand, the website, the search presence, the competitive landscape — and build a brutally honest picture of where things stand.
This isn't about being negative. It's about precision. A surgeon doesn't cut before imaging. I don't design before understanding. The critique phase produces a clear-eyed map of problems, opportunities, and priorities that makes every subsequent decision faster and more defensible.
Visual identity consistency, messaging coherence, touchpoint inventory. Does the brand say one thing and look like another? Where does it break down?
Crawl the site. Check indexing, schema, Core Web Vitals, internal linking, sitemap health. What's invisible to search engines and why?
Who ranks for your keywords? What do their brands look like? Where's the whitespace? I map 10–20 competitors across search and visual presence.
What are people actually searching for? I build a keyword universe organized by intent — informational, navigational, transactional — and map gaps.
I query ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini with the questions your customers ask. Does your brand appear? If not, why? What content would make it citable?
Talk to the owner, the team, the customers. What do they think the brand is? What do customers actually experience? Where's the gap?
Every critique phase ends with a single document: the Opportunity Brief. It's not a 60-page audit nobody reads. It's a focused, prioritized map that answers three questions:
Intentional craft guided by the critique. Every visual and structural decision traces back to a diagnosed need.
Design is where the critique becomes visible. But it's not "make it pretty" — it's "make it work." The brand identity, the website architecture, the content structure, the schema markup — they're all design decisions. I design the visual system and the information architecture simultaneously, because in a search-optimized world, structure IS design.
Every project gets a design system, not just a logo. The system ensures consistency across vehicle wraps, websites, print collateral, and social presence. And every structural decision — page hierarchy, content clusters, FAQ architecture — is made with both human usability and machine readability in mind.
Positioning statement, voice & tone, messaging hierarchy. What do we say, to whom, and why should they believe us? This drives everything downstream.
Logo design, color system, typography, iconography, photography direction. Built for reproduction across wrap vinyl, screens, and print stock.
Site structure, page hierarchy, content clusters, internal linking strategy. Designed for both user journeys and crawler efficiency.
Page-by-page content outlines with keyword targeting, FAQ structures, and Q&A pairs designed for AI citability. Words are design material.
Wireframes to high-fidelity mockups. Layout, spacing, interaction patterns, conversion elements. Tested against the critique's priority list.
Component library, brand guidelines document, asset exports for every medium. The client can extend the brand without me in the room.
If the critique said "you're invisible in local search," the design includes service-area pages and LocalBusiness schema — not just a prettier homepage.
How content is organized, linked, and marked up is as much a design choice as color or type. I design for humans and machines simultaneously.
A logo is a one-off. A brand system is an asset that compounds. Every project gets a system the client can grow into without re-hiring me.
Limited palette, disciplined type scale, consistent spacing. Restraint makes brands feel intentional and premium, not cheap or cluttered.
Build, launch, measure, iterate. The design becomes real, and we prove it works with data.
A beautiful Figma file that never ships is a expensive wallpaper. Implementation is where the design meets reality — code, production, deployment, and the unglamorous work of making sure everything actually functions. Semantic HTML, structured data, Core Web Vitals, print production, wrap installation — the craft is in the execution.
But implementation doesn't end at launch. I set up measurement from day one: Search Console, analytics, rank tracking, AI citation monitoring. The first 90 days post-launch are about watching, adjusting, and compounding. The critique said what to fix. The design said how. Implementation proves whether it worked — and iterates until it does.
Semantic HTML, CSS, structured data (JSON-LD), Core Web Vitals optimization. Clean code that search engines and AI crawlers can parse effortlessly.
Write and publish all pages, service-area content, FAQ entries, blog posts, and guides. Every piece optimized for its target query and AI citability.
Vehicle wrap printing and installation coordination, print collateral production, signage fabrication. Managing vendors and quality control.
Deploy, submit sitemaps, ping search engines, verify schema with rich results testing, confirm AI crawler access. Nothing ships half-indexed.
Deploy QR review funnels, seed Google Business Profile, build local citations, activate review automation. Social proof compounds from day one.
Weekly rank tracking, monthly traffic reports, AI citation monitoring, conversion analysis. Adjust content and technical elements based on real data.
Implementation isn't "launch and leave." Every project includes a 90-day optimization window where I monitor performance and iterate:
Most projects run 6–12 weeks end-to-end. The critique is never skipped, but its depth scales with project complexity.
Audit, research, interviews, competitive mapping, AI visibility check
Strategy, identity, architecture, content design, UI, system
Build, content, production, launch, review engine, 90-day optimization
The first conversation is free. I'll tell you what I see — the good, the bad, and the opportunity.
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