upstatement.com

Digital products are software-based experiences people use directly — apps, services, and platforms — as opposed to physical goods or static marketing pages. In a brand and design context, they're the interactive layer of a brand: the thing a user opens, taps, reads, or subscribes to. Upstatement, a global design and technology studio, describes its own output as "Digital products, apps, and services" alongside brand identity, design systems, and large-scale websites — a useful split for understanding where product work sits relative to other design disciplines.

Digital products vs. the things around them

Studios that build digital products usually also build the assets that support them. These are related but distinct kinds of work:

The distinction matters because a website redesign and a product build have different success criteria. A website is largely judged on communication and reach; a product is judged on whether it works repeatedly for its users. The same studio may do both, but the deliverables, timelines, and testing differ.

How an editorial mindset shapes product design

Upstatement describes itself as having "journalistic roots" and an "editorial mindset," and states that it believes "all brands are digital, and that systems can tell stories." That framing has practical consequences for how products get built:

• Story first, interface second. The team treats content and narrative as the spine of the product, not an afterthought filled in after the layout is done.
• Systems over one-off screens. The stated belief that "systems can tell stories" points toward design systems and reusable components rather than bespoke screens for every case.
• Editorial tools as first-class products. Media platforms and publishing tools appear in the studio's own list of what it builds, which means the people making the content are treated as users too.

This is a specific point of view, not a universal rule. A studio with an engineering-first or growth-first orientation would weight the same project differently — more emphasis on performance budgets or conversion experiments, less on narrative structure.

What the work looks like in practice

The studio's featured client list — Nike, Vogue, Etsy, MIT, Harvard, Microsoft, Walmart, PBS News, and ESPN — spans consumer brands, media organizations, and institutions. Two named projects illustrate the range:

• Nike: "A global digital brand reset" — brand-level work expressed through digital channels.
• Etsy: "The Universe of Special" — a campaign or brand expression rather than a utility product.

The MIT.edu redesign drew a notable piece of third-party feedback: Don Norman, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group and author of The Design of Everyday Things, is quoted saying, "This is easy to use." For a product or platform, ease of use from a usability authority is a meaningful signal — it suggests the editorial ambition didn't come at the cost of basic function.

Client-side quotes point at the same tension between craft and outcome. Travis Daub, Director of Digital at PBS News, describes being "stunned by the perfect execution on every element," while Brené Brown's comment focuses on being listened to "deep enough and wide enough" that the result was emotionally moving. Read together, they describe a process where research and execution quality are both treated as deliverables.

How to judge whether a studio fits a digital product build

If you're evaluating a partner for product work, the studio's own framing gives you concrete things to check:

1. Does their portfolio include products, or only websites? A studio that lists "digital products, apps, and services" separately from "large-scale websites" is signaling it treats them as different disciplines.
2. Do they have a stated point of view? Upstatement publishes "Points of view" including "Community products are the future" and "All brands are digital." A clear position tells you how they'll make trade-offs when requirements conflict.
3. Who are their clients, and what kind of work did they do? Institutional and media clients (MIT, PBS News, ESPN, Vogue) suggest strength in content-heavy, editorial-driven products. Consumer brand work (Nike, Etsy) suggests strength in brand expression.
4. Is there evidence of usability, not just aesthetics? Third-party validation from a usability figure is a stronger signal than a visual portfolio alone.

None of this tells you cost or timeline — the studio's public materials don't state pricing, and no pricing signals are available. Treat scope, budget, and schedule as questions to raise directly rather than assumptions to infer.

The short version

Digital products are the interactive, software-based part of a brand's presence — apps, services, and platforms — and they're built differently from brand identities or marketing websites. A studio with an editorial mindset approaches them by starting from story and content, building reusable systems rather than one-off screens, and treating the people who publish content as users in their own right. When choosing a partner, look for a portfolio that separates product work from website work, a stated point of view, and evidence that the result is usable and not just well-designed.

Getting a business website designed involves more than picking colours and fonts. A typical project runs through five phases: planning and content gathering, structure and wireframing, visual design, build and technical setup (domain, hosting, email), and launch with ongoing maintenance. The design work itself is only one part of the process — and the decisions you make early on, especially about structure and platform, directly determine how straightforward your domain, hosting, and connectivity setup will be later.

This guide walks through the whole sequence so you can plan realistically before you contact a designer or developer.

Phase 1: Planning and Content Gathering

Most delays in website projects come from content, not code. Before any design starts, you need to answer some basic questions and assemble raw material.

Questions to settle first

• What is the site for? A brochure site that generates enquiries, an online shop, a booking system, or a portfolio all lead to very different builds.
• Who is it for? The audience shapes tone, structure, and how much explanation each page needs.
• What does success look like? Enquiry form submissions, phone calls, online sales, or simply credibility when someone searches your business name.
• Who maintains it afterwards? If you want to edit text and images yourself, that pushes the project toward a content management system (CMS) rather than hand-coded pages.

Content to prepare before design begins

A designer can work with placeholder text, but the site will be better and faster to finish if you supply:

• Your logo in a vector format (SVG, AI, or EPS) if you have one
• Company description in short, medium, and long versions
• Service or product list with a sentence or two on each
• Contact details, opening hours, and location information
• Photographs — ideally original, high-resolution images of your team, premises, or products
• Any legal text you are required to display, such as a privacy policy

If you do not have photography, say so early. It affects both the design approach and the timeline.

Phase 2: Structure and Wireframing

Before visual design, the pages and their relationships need to be mapped out. This is usually called the sitemap and wireframe stage.

• Sitemap: a list of every page and how they nest. A typical small business site might have Home, About, Services (with sub-pages), Case Studies, and Contact.
• Wireframes: simple, unstyled layouts showing where headings, text, images, and buttons sit on each page type. No colours or fonts yet.

This stage is where you catch problems cheaply. If a page has no clear purpose, or if the navigation is confusing on paper, it will be worse once designed. Approving wireframes before visual design saves significant rework.

A note on mobile

Design should be planned mobile-first or at least mobile-aware from this stage. Most small business traffic now arrives on phones, and a layout that only works on a wide desktop screen will need to be redesigned, not just resized.

Phase 3: Visual Design

With structure agreed, the designer applies branding: typography, colour, imagery style, and spacing. You will typically see one or two key page designs first — usually the homepage and an inner page — before the rest are produced.

Things worth deciding at this point:

• Brand consistency: does the site match your existing signage, stationery, and social profiles?
• Accessibility: sufficient colour contrast and readable text sizes are not optional extras; they affect how many people can actually use the site.
• Calls to action: every page should make the next step obvious, whether that is calling, enquiring, or buying.

Expect at least one round of revisions. Two rounds is common; unlimited revisions usually signal a project that will drift.

Phase 4: Build and Technical Setup

This is where design meets infrastructure, and where choices start to have long-term consequences.

Domain names

Your domain is your address on the web. Points to settle:

• Do you already own it? If so, confirm you have login access to the registrar — not just the designer.
• Who should own it? The business should. A domain registered in a developer's name is a common and avoidable problem.
• Which extension? .co.uk and .com are the usual choices for UK businesses. Registering both and redirecting one to the other is a reasonable precaution.

Hosting

Hosting is the server space where the site lives. The right choice depends on the build:

Ask specifically about backups, uptime expectations, SSL certificates (the padlock in the browser), and what happens if you want to move the site later.

Email and connectivity

Your domain usually carries your business email, so email setup should be planned alongside the website, not after it. If staff work from an office, the broadband connection at that location affects how comfortably you can upload content, use cloud tools, and take video calls. Fibre availability varies by premises, so it is worth checking what is actually available at your address rather than assuming.

Build and testing

Before launch, the site should be tested on real devices, checked for broken links, and reviewed for spelling and grammar. Forms need to be submitted and confirmed as arriving in the right inbox. This stage is unglamorous but it is where most launch-day surprises are prevented.

Phase 5: Launch and Aftercare

Launch itself is usually quick: the site is moved to live hosting, the domain is pointed at it, and SSL is confirmed. The work that follows matters more.

• Backups: confirm they run automatically and that you know how to restore one.
• Updates: if the site uses a CMS, software and plugins need updating to stay secure.
• Analytics: some form of traffic measurement helps you judge whether the site is doing its job.
• Content ownership: make sure you have admin access to the CMS, the domain registrar, and the hosting account.

Roles and Responsibilities: Who Does What

Clear division of labour prevents most disputes. A typical split looks like this:

The most important principle: you should own your domain, hosting, and content, even if the provider manages them day to day.

Common Pitfalls That Delay Projects

• Content arriving late, especially photography and legal text
• Feedback coming from too many people with no single decision-maker
• Changing the scope midway — adding a shop or a booking system after design has started
• Domain or hosting registered in the provider's name
• No plan for who updates the site after launch
• Choosing a platform that cannot grow with the business

A Practical Pre-Project Checklist

Before you approach a designer or developer, have these ready:

1. A one-paragraph description of your business and what the site must achieve
2. A list of pages you think you need
3. Your logo files and any brand guidelines
4. At least some original photography, or a budget decision about sourcing it
5. Confirmation of who owns your current domain, if you have one
6. A named decision-maker on your side
7. A rough timeline and a realistic view of when you can supply content

Working through these phases in order — plan, structure, design, build, launch — keeps a website project predictable. The design is the visible part, but the planning and the technical setup underneath are what determine whether the site launches on time and remains useful afterwards.

An enterprise website is a large-scale site whose complexity comes from governance, integrations, and content volume rather than page count alone. It typically serves multiple audiences and stakeholders, connects to other business systems, and must stay consistent as many people edit it over time. You need enterprise-grade planning when a single team can no longer keep the site coherent, or when the site must support localization, accessibility, and performance at a scale a small business site never reaches.

What actually makes a website "enterprise"

Page count is a weak signal. A 50-page site with one editor and no integrations is not enterprise. A 200-page site with regional variants, a design system, and a CMS feeding three other products usually is.

The distinguishing factors are:

• Multiple stakeholders. Marketing, product, legal, regional teams, and executives all have a say. Decisions need a structure, not just a sign-off.
• Governance and ownership. Someone must own the design system, the content model, and the release process after launch.
• Integrations. The site connects to CRMs, analytics, search, authentication, or commerce systems.
• Scale of content and localization. Many pages, many authors, often multiple languages.
• Longevity. The site is expected to survive redesign cycles, staff turnover, and new product lines.

How enterprise work differs from a standard business site

The practical consequence: enterprise projects spend more effort on systems and process than on individual pages. A studio like Upstatement describes its work as building "brand identity and design systems," "digital products, apps, and services," and "large-scale websites" — the design system and the website are treated as one deliverable, not separate phases.

What building one involves

1. Scoping and stakeholder alignment

Define audiences, goals, and success measures before design starts. On enterprise projects this phase often includes interviews across departments, because the site has to satisfy competing internal priorities.

2. Brand and design system

Establish visual identity and the reusable components that will carry it. This is what keeps hundreds of pages consistent when many people contribute.

3. Content model and CMS

Decide what content types exist, how they relate, and who can edit what. This is usually the difference between a site that scales and one that becomes unmaintainable.

4. Build and integration

Develop the site, connect it to the systems it depends on, and test performance and accessibility.

5. Migration and launch

Move existing content into the new structure. Migration is consistently one of the most underestimated parts of enterprise work.

6. Governance after launch

Assign ownership, document the system, and set a release process so the site doesn't drift.

A worked example: MIT.edu

Upstatement lists MIT among its featured clients and cites a redesign of MIT.edu. Don Norman — co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group and author of The Design of Everyday Things — is quoted on the page saying, "This is easy to use." That's a useful signal for what enterprise work is judged on: not visual novelty, but whether a large, information-dense site remains usable for many different audiences. A university site has to serve prospective students, current students, faculty, researchers, press, and donors — a governance and content-model problem as much as a design one.

Common pitfalls

• Underestimating content migration. Moving and restructuring existing content often takes longer than the visual design.
• Treating accessibility as a final check. At enterprise scale it has to be built into components from the start.
• Ignoring performance. Heavy pages and third-party scripts compound across a large site.
• Approval bottlenecks. Without a clear decision structure, reviews stall.
• No post-launch owner. A design system without governance decays quickly.

Do you need an enterprise-grade build?

Ask these questions:

• Do more than two teams need to edit or approve content?
• Does the site need to connect to other business systems?
• Will it support multiple languages or regions?
• Does it need to stay consistent across hundreds of pages and years of updates?

If most answers are yes, plan for enterprise-grade work: a design system, a structured content model, and a governance plan. If most are no, a simpler site will serve you better and cost less to maintain.

For reference on how one studio frames this work, see Upstatement, which describes itself as a global design and technology studio building brands, websites, and digital products.

Editorial design is the craft of organizing content—text, images, and their relationships—so that hierarchy, sequence, and meaning come through clearly to a reader. On the web and in digital products, it applies wherever content must be structured for comprehension: large-scale websites, media platforms, publishing tools, and the design systems that hold them together. It differs from general graphic or web design in that its primary problem is not visual style or interface mechanics but how a body of content should be shaped, ordered, and paced.

The core concerns of editorial design

Editorial design starts from the content rather than the container. Its recurring decisions are:

• Hierarchy — what a reader sees first, second, and third, and how that ranking is expressed through scale, weight, position, and spacing.
• Sequence and pacing — how one piece of content leads to the next, where breaks fall, and how long a reader stays in one mode before the page shifts.
• Typographic systems — typefaces, sizes, line lengths, and spacing rules that hold across many pages and many authors, not just one layout.
• Relationship between text and image — captions, credits, crops, and placement that make images carry meaning rather than decorate.
• Navigation as narrative — how sections, indexes, and related-content links let a reader move through a large body of work without losing the thread.

These concerns exist in print, but they become harder and more consequential on the web, because content changes, scales, and arrives from multiple sources.

How editorial thinking shapes digital products and websites

Upstatement describes itself as a global design and technology studio with journalistic roots, and states that it believes "all brands are digital, and that systems can tell stories." That framing is a useful illustration of how editorial design operates at scale: the studio lists brand identity and design systems, digital products and services, large-scale websites, and editorial tools and media platforms among what it builds.

In practice, editorial design shows up in digital work in a few distinct ways:

Large-scale websites

When a site has hundreds or thousands of pages—an institution, a news organization, a global brand—the design problem is not one page but a system of pages. Editorial design supplies the rules that let any page, written by any team, read as part of the same publication. The MIT.edu redesign is cited on Upstatement's site with a comment from Don Norman, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group and author of The Design Of Everyday Things, who called it "easy to use." That pairing—editorial structure plus usability—is characteristic of the discipline: clarity of content and clarity of interaction are treated as the same problem.

Editorial tools and media platforms

Some digital products are themselves publishing systems. Here editorial design shapes the author's experience as much as the reader's: how a story is composed, what fields and templates exist, how a headline, deck, and body relate, and what constraints keep output consistent. A platform's design decisions determine what kinds of stories its users can tell well.

Brand identity and design systems

Editorial design connects to brand work because a brand's voice is expressed through its content, not only its logo. A design system that encodes typographic scale, spacing, and content patterns is effectively an editorial rulebook. Upstatement's client list includes Nike, Vogue, Etsy, MIT, Harvard, Microsoft, Walmart, PBS News, and ESPN—a mix of media, retail, institutional, and enterprise work, which reflects how broadly these content-structuring problems appear.

How editorial design differs from general graphic or web design

The two overlap heavily—most good editorial design is also good interface design—but the starting point differs. Editorial design begins with the material and asks what structure it needs.

What this means if you are commissioning or building

If you are planning a website or digital product with substantial content, editorial design is the part of the work that determines whether readers can find, follow, and finish what you publish. Concretely, that means deciding early:

• What content types exist (articles, profiles, indexes, data pages) and how each should be structured.
• What the hierarchy is within a page and across the site.
• Which typographic and spacing rules will hold everywhere, and who maintains them.
• How navigation and related content turn a set of pages into a readable sequence.

These decisions are cheapest to make before visual design and build, and most expensive to retrofit afterward. The evidence from studios working in this mode—journalistic roots applied to brand, product, and enterprise web work—is that treating content structure as a first-class design problem is what makes large digital properties feel coherent rather than assembled.

Brand design is the practice of defining a brand's identity, voice, and visual system, then extending that system across every surface a person encounters — websites, apps, products, and editorial platforms. It is not logo design. A logo is one output of brand design; the work itself is building a coherent, reusable system that others can apply at scale. This matters most for organizations that ship across many digital touchpoints, where inconsistency compounds quickly.

Brand design vs. logo design

The distinction is scope and reusability.

A logo answers "what do we look like in one place?" Brand design answers "how do we look, sound, and behave everywhere, including places that don't exist yet?"

How brand design extends into digital products

Digital-first studios treat the brand as something that lives in interfaces, not just in campaign assets. Upstatement, a design and technology studio, frames this directly: "We believe all brands are digital, and that systems can tell stories." That framing changes what gets designed.

In practice, brand design work across digital products typically covers:

• Brand identity and design systems — the foundational layer: type, color, motion, tone, and the rules that govern them.
• Digital products, apps, and services — the brand expressed through interaction, not just appearance.
• Large-scale websites — where brand, content, and performance meet.
• Editorial tools and media platforms — systems for publishing, where voice and structure carry the brand.

The common thread is that each surface is a place the brand has to function, not just appear.

Why design systems carry the brand at scale

A brand that only exists as a style guide fails the moment ten teams start shipping. A design system converts brand decisions into components, tokens, and rules that product and engineering teams can actually use.

This is the mechanism that makes brand consistency possible without central approval on every screen. When the system is working, a new feature inherits the brand by default rather than by review. When it isn't, every team reinvents the brand slightly differently, and the result reads as several companies sharing a logo.

Editorial thinking as a brand method

Upstatement describes itself as having "journalistic roots" and an "editorial mindset." For brand work, this means treating storytelling and information hierarchy as part of identity, not decoration. A brand's voice, the order in which it presents ideas, and how it structures content are all brand decisions.

This shows up in the studio's client list and framing. Nike is described as "a global digital brand reset," and Etsy as "The Universe of Special" — both framed as brand-level work delivered through digital, not as website projects with brand elements attached.

What this looks like in practice

The clearest way to see brand design working is through outcomes at recognizable scale. Upstatement's featured clients include Nike, Vogue, Etsy, MIT, Harvard, Microsoft, Walmart, ESPN, and PBS News.

Two signals are worth noting from the source material:

• On the MIT.edu redesign, Don Norman — co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group and author of The Design of Everyday Things — commented, "This is easy to use." Usability is treated as part of the brand outcome, not separate from it.
• On collaborating with the studio, Brené Brown described the difficulty of building something people are "emotionally moved" by, and said she had "never seen it done better than this."

The pattern: brand design at this level is judged by whether the system works and whether it lands emotionally — not by whether the mark is attractive.

How to tell if you need brand design or just a website

Ask one question: do you have a system, or do you have assets?

• You need brand design if multiple teams ship digital surfaces, if your identity breaks down outside a homepage, or if you can't describe your voice in a way others can apply.
• You need a website project if your identity is settled and documented, and the gap is execution on one surface.

Most organizations that think they need a redesign actually need the system underneath it. That's the difference brand design makes.