Why I’ve stopped starting projects with design and what changes when direction comes first.
As a brand designer, it’s hard not to get excited when a new project hits your inbox. You start scrolling through a company’s website, their social channels, their visuals and suddenly your brain lights up. You see all the possibilities. All the ways a brand could be sharpened, elevated, reimagined. You crave that “aha” moment. The reveal. The shift in perception. The moment when something finally clicks.
I love that part of the work. I always have.
But over time, I realized something uncomfortable. Starting with design isn’t working the way it used to.
I’ve been in this industry for well over a decade. When I started, web and app design still felt like discovery. Visual clarity often was the solution. Today, design is everywhere. Tools are accessible. Platforms like Instagram and Pinterest have turned everyone into a curator, a stylist, a storyteller. As a result, even weak businesses can look polished.
And that’s the problem.
Design amplifies decisions. When those decisions aren’t fully formed, design can end up amplifying the wrong ones.
Over the years, I’ve worked with too many founders who came to me exhausted, after spending serious money on a beautiful website or brand refresh that didn’t move the needle. Conversion paths were unclear. Positioning was fuzzy. Packaging looked great but didn’t sell. Their instincts weren’t wrong. Something did need to change. But the order of operations was off.
Not that long ago, a visual redesign could resolve uncertainty. Today, it often masks it.
Many projects don’t begin with a blank slate. They begin with a request. A founder comes to a design team and says, “We need a new website,” or “We need a rebrand,” or “We need better packaging.” What they’re often really saying is something feels off, but the language available to them is deliverables.
That makes complete sense. When you’re inside the business, you diagnose the problem the best way you can. But when projects start with solutions instead of questions, it’s easy to treat symptoms without addressing what’s actually misaligned. And that kind of misalignment has a way of slowing growth, even when everything looks like it’s moving forward.
That’s why I no longer start with execution, even when execution is what’s being asked for. My role isn’t just to deliver what’s requested. It’s to help determine whether that’s the right move, in the right order, for the right reason.
The most valuable thing I can give a client isn’t a design system. It’s help deciding what their brand should actually feel like to someone encountering it for the first time.
When I talk about direction, I’m not talking about business plans or five-year visions. I’m talking about brand experience. The moment someone lands on your site, picks up your product, scrolls past your post, or hears your name for the first time. Your brand isn’t what you think it is. It’s what people experience in those moments. Direction is deciding what that experience should stand for before design turns up the volume.
When that’s clear, everything downstream gets easier. Design moves faster. Decisions feel obvious instead of exhausting. The “aha” moment still happens. It just happens before a single design file is created.
This way of working does require something from both sides. Curiosity. Trust. A willingness to pause and ask better questions before jumping to solutions. But when clients are open to that collaboration, the work is stronger, and it lasts.
In my experience, the biggest power move a founder can make is pausing before building.