Insight
Court
I walked away from a high-paying client. They wanted a brand refresh and a new website. The budget was solid, the timeline sort of reasonable, but something felt off.
When I dug deeper, it became clear they had no idea what their business actually stood for. No positioning. No clear values. Just a vague sense that a shinier website would solve their customer acquisition problem.
Here's the thing: great web design is only as strong as the brand strategy behind it. Without a clear foundation, even the most beautifully designed website ends up feeling like surface-level decoration.
And pretty without purpose is just expensive decoration.
Look at Gap's (albeit old but fantastic example) rebrand disaster in 2010. Gap introduced the new logo without any warning or engagement strategy. Designed to appear modern, they replaced their iconic blue box logo that had served them for 24 years with plain black text and a small gradient square. Within six days, and amid intense public backlash, the brand reversed course. It was a hefty priced experiment in branding that went spectacularly wrong.
Beautiful design. Terrible strategy. Expensive mistake.
I've seen this pattern repeatedly, businesses that mistake visual polish for brand strategy:
When the brief is 'make it look more premium', without understanding what premium actually means for that specific business.
Adopting the latest design trends because they look good, not because they communicate anything meaningful about the business.
When design gets diluted through endless revisions until it's inoffensive but also invisible.
Without strategy, the value of your design cannot be determined. You end up with something that looks professional but doesn't actually do anything.
Real brand design starts with one question: what makes your business matter?
Every visual choice should reinforce that truth. Design isn't and shouldn't be decoration, but rather translation.
Before you commission any design work, ask yourself:
What authentic value do we bring that nobody else does?
What would we lose if we disappeared tomorrow?
What truth about our business are we afraid to say out loud?
If you can't answer these clearly, you're not ready for design. You need strategy.
A real strategy involves a clear set of choices that define what the brand is going to do and what it's not going to do. Design without this foundation is just expensive decoration, and decoration doesn't drive business results. If it does - that's pure luck.
When your brand is built on authentic business truth, everything else falls into place. People get it. They trust it. They remember it.
And that's when pretty becomes pretty f*ing powerful.
