Designing the Strategy Layer: How I Start a Brand or Website Project

Most projects arrive in the same vague shape: someone wants a new site, or a refresh, or “something that feels clearer.” The request is almost never the real problem. The real problem is the thing underneath — the part they can feel but haven’t named yet. That’s where I begin.

The first conversation is mostly listening. Not for deliverables, but for tension. What’s out of alignment? What’s confusing them? Where’s the drift between how they see themselves and how their brand currently behaves in the world? Once that surfaces, the work has direction.

I try to picture the person who will eventually land on the site. Not a persona — a real person, glancing at the page on a lunch break, or half-distracted after work. They’re trying to answer a very simple question: Is this for me? If the site can answer that quickly, most of the heavy lifting is done.

Before anything visual happens, I map the structure. It’s never glamorous — usually a few boxes on a page, arrows, scribbles, a rough sense of hierarchy. But this is where clarity happens. Structure decides what belongs and what doesn’t. It decides how someone moves, what they notice first, where they hesitate. When the structure is wrong, the whole project feels heavier than it should. When it’s right, everything else becomes obvious.

Messaging sits inside the structure. It sets the tone. I’m not trying to write perfect copy at this stage — just the spine of the story. What’s the simplest way to describe what the business actually does? What’s the one idea that should sit at the top? What earns trust without overselling? Once this is in place, the design choices stop feeling arbitrary.

The visual layer comes last. Typography, spacing, colour — these decisions aren’t aesthetic preferences; they’re expressions of the strategy. The design should feel inevitable, like it could only ever have been this way. When the foundation is solid, the visuals fall into place with very little forcing.

There’s always a moment where the project clicks. It stops being a mess of decisions and becomes a single, coherent thing. That moment only arrives if the early work was honest.

Strategy isn’t a phase — it’s the container everything else sits inside.

This is the rhythm I follow with every brand or website I work on, including the current work with Circle Electrical. The visual work is coming, but it only makes sense because the structure underneath is finally holding its shape.

— Elia