Content-first discovery
We start with what you actually publish and who publishes it. The content model shapes the design, rather than the design dictating what content is allowed to exist.
Build · Design
Most agency design ends at a beautiful mockup and falls apart the moment real content and real editors arrive. We design systems, not pictures — so what launches matches what was approved, and still looks right two years later.
The problem
What was approved in Figma is not what shipped. Spacing drifted, states were invented on the fly, and the developer filled the gaps with guesses because the design never covered them.
Fourteen button styles, six card variants and three different heading scales. Nobody decided this — it accumulated, one rushed page at a time, until the brand stopped feeling like one brand.
Designed with three-word headlines and perfect placeholder images. Then real content arrived: long product names, missing photos, six navigation items instead of four, and the layout gave up.
Nothing stops someone dropping a full-width image into a narrow section or picking a colour that is not in the palette. Without constraints, the design decays as soon as the team starts publishing.
How it works
Your audience, your competitors and what your current site is doing to both.
What you publish and how it is structured, agreed before any visual work.
Two or three distinct directions on real content, not mood boards.
Tokens, components and states built out from the chosen direction.
A clickable prototype your team can use before anything is coded.
Documented specs and a walkthrough with whoever is building it.
Results
SaaS marketing site
A design system with 24 components replaced a folder of one-off page designs. The team now ships campaign pages in a day without a designer or developer involved.
Multi-brand system
A group with three consumer brands was maintaining three unrelated sites. We built one token-driven system with per-brand themes, so components are shared and only the surface changes.
Capabilities
Engagement
Fixed fee
A focused week or two producing direction, key templates and a component starter set — enough to decide whether the direction is right before committing to a full build.
Fixed price after discovery
The complete system: content model, tokens, every component and pattern, prototypes and documented handoff, ready for build by us or by your own team.
Monthly
Ongoing design support for teams shipping continuously — new patterns, campaign pages and keeping the system coherent as it grows.
Questions
If your situation isn't covered here, send us the details and we'll reply with a straight answer.
Figma for the system and the thinking, WordPress for the truth. We design tokens, components and templates in Figma, then map them to theme.json and block patterns so the built site inherits the system rather than approximating it. Designing directly in WordPress works for small sites but makes it very hard to explore alternatives cheaply.
Yes, because we design what can be built and document the parts that usually get lost — hover and focus states, empty states, long-content behaviour and every breakpoint. Most design-to-build drift comes from decisions the design never made, so the developer had to invent them. We make those decisions upfront.
Yes, and often that is the whole job. Brand guidelines cover print and logo usage far more often than they cover interface: focus states, form errors, data tables, empty states. We extend your brand into a digital system without contradicting what already exists.
Either. Some clients take our handoff to their own developers, which is exactly why the documentation is thorough. Others have us design and build in one engagement, which is usually faster because nothing gets lost between two companies.
Constraints in the editor. Blocks ship with locked patterns, a fixed palette and defined spacing, so an editor cannot accidentally break the layout or invent a new colour. Freedom where content needs it, guardrails everywhere else — that is what keeps a site looking designed two years later.
That is common, and it is why the content model comes before visual design. We work from a realistic outline — actual headline lengths, actual product counts, actual image availability — rather than placeholder text. Designing against lorem ipsum is how sites end up breaking on launch day.
Start here
The more you can tell us, the more useful our first reply will be. No sales sequence — one of the people who would actually do the work reads this.
Prefer email? hello@dotance.com