Why drawing 50 logo concepts by hand before opening design software consistently beats going straight to the computer.
There’s a comfortable trap in branding work: the first logo idea is always the most seductive, and it’s almost always wrong.
The 50-sketch rule: before any concept reaches the screen, draw 50 of them by hand. Most will be rubbish. That’s the point — the interesting ideas live in sketches 30–45.
Field notes on design, brand and the craft of building a better small business online — straight from my desk.
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Read article →Thirty minutes, no pressure, no sales pitch. A conversation about the opportunity and what a properly built site could do.
It depends on the scope. A focused landing page, a fully bespoke website and an e-commerce build are very different pieces of work, and the same is true of ongoing support, SEO and Studio retainers, so every engagement is quoted individually after a short conversation about what you need, and confirmed in a written proposal before anything starts.
However a project is priced, we break it into milestones — each with a fixed price tied to a working deliverable. You never pay 50% of the total cost up front. Instead, you pay 50% of the first milestone to start it. When that milestone is complete, you pay the remaining 50% of it together with the 50% deposit on the next milestone — and that's what unlocks the next phase of work. The pattern continues until the final milestone is delivered, at which point you pay the remaining 50% of it.
The effect: cash flow stays smooth, you always see a working deliverable before paying for the next, and we never carry more than half a milestone of unbilled work.
Indicative timings:
Delivery is broken into milestones built around working functionality, not internal phases like “design” or “build” in isolation. Think of it like an MVP and then MVP+1, MVP+2 — at the end of every milestone you have a live, usable thing you can see and sign off on.
For a typical website project, the milestones look something like this:
You'll always know what we're working on each week and what's due back from you. We never start the next milestone until the previous one is signed off and paid for, which keeps surprises out of the project.
Yes, and this is what our Studio packages are built for. Instead of piecing together a freelance designer, a marketing agency, a developer, and a hosting account, you get all of it from one team on one monthly fee:
Studio is best for businesses who'd otherwise hire a junior designer plus a part-time marketer. It's also how we work with most of our long-standing clients — they like having one point of contact for the whole digital side.
Yes — four WP Care plans, scaled to the size of your site, covering plugin and core updates, daily backups, security and performance monitoring, and content tweaks. Most clients pair their build with at least our Essentials plan so the site stays healthy and up to date.