Launching a brand,
what to decide before the design

Straight to it — the first thing to settle for a launch site isn't colour, isn't type, isn't a folder of references. It's who arrives on this screen, and what they should have done before they leave. Those two lines are the underdrawing, and while they're blank, every decision after them is an argument about taste.

A new brand's site isn't there to be checked. It's there to convince.

The site of a brand people already know is a place to check things. Someone knows the name, searches it, comes in, confirms a price or a stock level or an address, and leaves. The site only has to keep already-built trust in order.

A brand that's just launching is in a different position. Most visitors are meeting the brand for the first time on that screen. What you sell, why it costs what it costs, whether you're real — all of it is judged there and then, from nothing. Both get called a brand site, but the new one isn't a counter for checking things. It has to explain, and it has to convince.

Yet launch preparation almost always runs in one fixed order. Collect references, choose a colour and a typeface, refine the logo. Every one of those answers "how will this look". Nobody has answered "what should this make someone do".

Flip that order and the whole project turns into an argument about taste. Is this colour better, is this photograph better, is this sentence better — with no basis for a verdict, the loudest voice or the last person to speak wins. What comes out of that can be good-looking and still not move anyone to do anything.

Three things to settle before the design

1. The one visitor you answer first. Not by demographics — sort them by state. Someone meeting the brand for the first time; someone who heard the name and came to check; someone reviewing you for stock, partnership or investment. In the weeks after a launch, all three arrive. But there is only one first screen. Choose which comes first and the rest fall into an order beneath it. Skip the choice and you get a screen speaking to all three at once, which reaches none of them.
2. The one action they should take before leaving. Buy, enquire, pre-order, join a list, request a deck. Early on, getting someone reachable is often the right goal rather than an immediate sale. If production, stock or retail timing isn't settled yet and the only large button says buy, the attention you worked hard to gather scatters at the moment you weren't ready to catch it. Once the action is fixed, the length of the page, the kind of proof you need and the words on the button all follow from it.
3. How you handle what you don't have yet. A new brand has no reviews, no delivered projects, no sales figures. The moment you fill those gaps with something plausible, the site collapses — invented reviews and inflated numbers are obvious to the person who wrote them before they're obvious to anyone else. What a new brand does have is different material: how the thing is made, why the material and the process were chosen that way, who is making it, what you've decided not to do. With no track record, trust is built out of the reasoning behind your decisions.

Once those three are settled, the question behind every design decision changes. Not "which of these is prettier" but "which of these carries our first visitor to that action". Taste drops down into something you can adjudicate. Even the references change — you start choosing them because they do the job, not because they look good.

Five lines to write before launch

If you're preparing a brand right now, write these five lines before anyone opens a design tool.

• Which of the three do you answer first — someone new, someone checking, or someone reviewing you?
• Is there one action written down that you want them to take before they leave?
• Have you written out what they'll want to confirm before taking it?
• Do you have material to fill the space where reviews and results would be — without inventing any?
• Are the references you've collected there because they look good, or because they carry someone to that action?

Start with the design while the first two lines are blank and you'll launch a screen that says nothing at all. What that kind of site turns into later is written up separately in a site people compliment, and nobody enquires.