The first artifact of every Fieldstone project is not a mockup. It is a plain text document: the homepage, written out in full, in a text editor, in the order a visitor will meet it. Headline, supporting line, the sections, the buttons — words only, no boxes, no colors, nowhere to hide.
This feels austere for about a day. Then it starts paying. A homepage that only works when a beautiful photograph is carrying it does not work. A service described in words that survive a text editor will survive anything; a service that needs a gradient behind it was never described at all. Writing first separates what the business says from how it looks saying it, and the first of those is the one customers believe.
The text document also settles arguments early, while they are cheap. “What does the main headline promise?” is a one-hour discussion in week one and a one-month redesign in week nine. Clients mark up sentences the way they would never dare mark up a design, and the markup is better for it — direct, specific, about meaning.
Design begins when the document can be read aloud, start to finish, and sound like one honest person talking. Then our job is simple to describe and hard to do: make it look the way it sounds.
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