Our own website waited about a year for a redesign. I kept wanting it perfect. Last month I set myself a hard frame, rebuilt it between client projects and shipped. Designers do the same with portfolios for years. Startups do it with products. For me the deadline did more for quality than the year of waiting

bento animations made with Claude

Founders love sending me their Google performance scores. 95 out of 100, look how good the website is. It's just a number. Google measures loading speed, not whether anyone understands the product. A 95-score website can confuse every visitor while a plain one quietly sells every day. So when we build, the score is the last thing we check. First: does a stranger get the product in 5 seconds.

Let's talk about your project unroot.design/call

Worst advice I keep hearing for websites that need to sell: put a CTA above the fold, make it bigger, brighter. Visitors don't click buttons they don't understand. First the product, the problem it solves, a reason to trust. Then the button. On our projects the CTA is the last thing we place.

The most expensive early hire I keep seeing at startups: the full-time designer. On paper he's cheaper than a studio. In practice the founder onboards him, pays benefits, manages him, and waits months while he gets up to speed. And later the in-house designer lives inside the product like in a vacuum. Everything feels obvious to him, so he explains the product in a way new users don't get. That outside view is half of what our clients pay us for. Even big companies hand design tasks outside for exactly this reason.

Animated interface. Made with Opus

A few weeks ago a client asked us for heavy wow effects on his new website. I told him straight: we can pile on animations, but your visitors might stop understanding what the product does. Award-winning websites show it well. A month after the award, many get quietly replaced. Beyond the splash, they don't sell. So we kept the wow where it helps and spent the rest of the effort on clarity. His website has to sell every day, not win awards

quick animation. made with Claude

Last week a client asked us for a promo video. We're a web design studio, and my designers met the task with zero enthusiasm. I didn't reply "we don't do video". We agreed to try, with the client judging the result. One of my designers made it so well I had nothing to criticize. And I always find something. The client got his video without hiring a video team. "We don't do that" would've killed this story before it started. So we never open with it. We open with "let's try, you decide".

xitter.cf/unrootdesign/status/21… more designs for Radient

Last week at Unroot: Wrapped a project for an AI-savvy client (NDA, can't show) Signed a 6-month renewal with a client of almost 3 years A new client reached out, kickoff is around the corner

pure

a bit of mobile design radient

We ar unroot run all our current projects without a project manager. AI quietly took that job. It tracks statuses, preps client updates, turns call notes into tasks, reminds me what's stuck. A designer with AI doesn't need someone to run the process anymore. Taste and clients, the rest got automated.

A client we've worked with for almost 3 years just signed another 6-month contract with us. That's 30+ projects since we started together. No pitch deck, no sales calls. They know how we work, we know what they need. Long contracts don't come from portfolios. They come from them never having to chase us