Our New Site Is Live. Here’s What It Cost.
Not money. Well, some money. But that’s not the interesting part. Thinking Cap, Issue #2 from Bluecap Studio
The interesting part is that we’ve been telling clients for years that a rebrand is uncomfortable, that the middle of it feels worse than the beginning, and that the discomfort is the work. Very easy to say from the outside of it. Considerably less fun to live inside it for a few months.
Anyway. bluecapstudio.com is live. It’s new. Go look at it.
Now let us tell you about the part nobody puts in the case study.
We were terrible clients
Truly. If we’d hired us, we’d have fired us.
The problem with being your own client is that there’s no one to make the call. On a normal project, there’s a moment where the client says “yes, that one,” and everything downstream gets easier. We didn’t have that moment. We had two creative directors, both of whom have opinions, both of whom are used to being the person in the room who decides.
And here’s the embarrassing part: we weren’t even arguing. We were stuck.
Do we lead with the work, or lead with the thinking? Deb would make the case for the work: show them, don’t tell them, let the portfolio do the talking. Solid. Then Dave would make the case for the thinking: anyone can post pretty pictures, the methodology is the whole differentiator. Also solid. Then we’d switch sides. Then we’d switch back.
Two creative directors, twenty-plus years of doing this, circling the same drain for weeks. Not because we disagreed. Because we both kept seeing the other one’s point.
What got us out was Xavier.
Xavier is our guardian angel and one of his gifts is refusing to let two creative brains stay in the clouds when there’s a business on the ground. He listened to us go around the loop one more time, and then asked the question that made the whole thing collapse:
Who is this for, what do they need, and why you?
Which is, of course, the first question of Design Thinking. Which is a discipline we both trained in. Which is also the exact question we ask every client on day one.
We’d forgotten to ask it about ourselves. SMH.
Once we did, the whole work-versus-thinking debate evaporated, because it turned out to be a false choice, and worse, a self-absorbed one. Both options were about us. Nobody lands on your site wondering whether you’re more of a work studio or a thinking studio. They land wondering: what’s your value, what am I actually buying, and what makes you different from the nine other tabs I have open?
The work answers a piece of that. The thinking answers a piece of that. Neither answers it alone, and leading with either one makes the visitor do the assembly themselves.
So we stopped choosing and started building for the need. Which is when we noticed the need wasn’t one need. It was three.
Three doors
We had three completely different conversations happening on one page, all shouting over each other.
A founder six months into a start-up needs to know we won’t build them something they’ll have to throw away next year. A small business owner needs to know they’re not signing up for an enterprise process and an enterprise invoice. An enterprise team needs to know the system survives contact with twelve stakeholders and a legal review.
Same methodology underneath. Radically different starting points.
For years we treated that as a nuance we’d handle in the first call. Which is a polite way of saying we made people do the sorting themselves, and hoped they’d stick around long enough to be sorted. Some didn’t. That’s on us, not them.
The bot that ate our newsletter
Here’s a small, stupid, perfect story.
We put bot protection on the site. Good idea. Sensible. Responsible, even.
Then we noticed the newsletter signup form wasn’t working. Not “working badly”, just not working at all. The bot protection was so diligent it had decided our own subscribers were bots and was quietly turning away every single person who tried to sign up.
We’d built a beautiful front door and installed a bouncer who wouldn’t let anyone in.
There’s a version of this on every project we’ve ever run. Some element that’s doing exactly what it was designed to do, correctly, in isolation, while wrecking the thing it was supposed to serve. It’s never the flashy part. It’s always the plumbing.
We fixed it. But we think about it a lot, because it’s the cleanest example we’ve got of why we harp on systems instead of pieces. A piece can be perfect and still be wrong. Only the system can tell you which.
(Same story with the cookie consent banner, which decided to take the site’s entire animation engine down with it. Different villain, identical lesson.)
What we actually believe now
A website isn’t a brochure. We’ve said that before and we’ll say it again because it took us this long to fully take our own point.
It’s the first working demo of how you think. Before anyone talks to you, before they see your work, before they know your name, they’ve already read your reasoning off the structure of the thing. Whether you meant them to or not.
Which means a studio that claims to build systems and ships an inconsistent site isn’t making a design mistake. It’s making an argument, and losing it.
So we rebuilt it. Not because the old one was ugly. It wasn’t. Because it wasn’t arguing for anything.
Okay, your turn
Go click around bluecapstudio.com.
Break something if you can find something to break; there’s a nonzero chance you will, and we’d honestly rather hear it from you than find it ourselves at 11pm.
And if you read this and thought, “oh no, that’s my site,” that’s not a sales pitch, that’s just recognition. Everyone’s site is that site for a while. Ours was, for a while.
But if you want to talk about it, you know where we are.
Newly, and much more clearly, findable.
— Dave & Deb