How I work, Erik Smith

Every project I build goes through the same four steps, whether it’s mine or a client’s. I’d rather show you than tell you, so scroll on and I’ll walk you through each one with the real work as the proof.

I don’t open a design tool until I know what’s actually broken.

Every real project starts with someone’s actual site, or their actual competitors, not a blank page. I pull it apart first: what’s confusing, what’s slow, what a real person would trip on. The direction comes out of that, never a mood board.

What the competitor already got wrong: Before I draw anything, I look at who else is already doing this and read their reviews, not just their homepage. The complaints tell you more than the design does. That’s where a real direction starts. A swatch I liked doesn’t count.
The lead that starts with their friction: The best way in isn’t a cold pitch, it’s showing someone the actual problem on their actual site before they’ve ever heard my name. A mockup of their own homepage says more than a portfolio link ever could.

I’d rather hand you three real options than guess right once.

Every client decision goes the same way. I build a short set of real directions, pull my own favorite out of the room so the reaction stays honest, and let the actual person react. What they say no to matters as much as what they pick.

Okay, three real directions here. Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear, just tell me which one’s actually you.
Not the first one. The second, but that blue’s a lot.
Yeah, I had a feeling about that blue. What if we knock it down a shade instead of scrapping it.
Sure. Why not the third one though, I liked that font.
It read great on desktop, but it fell apart on a phone, and that’s most of your traffic.

The style guide isn’t a deliverable. It’s the thing the whole build gets checked against.

Once we land on a direction, it becomes a real style guide, colors, type, spacing, voice, all in one place, and that’s what we’re actually signing off on. Everything after that gets checked against it automatically as the build grows. Here’s where that shows up as real architecture, built in from the start.

This whole page reads in OpenDyslexic if you want it to. OpenDyslexic is a free typeface with heavier, weighted bottoms on every letter. They stay anchored, so the brain is less likely to flip or rotate them, which is the b, d, p, q swap a lot of dyslexic readers fight. I wired it in as a one-tap choice, sized on purpose, not a compromise everyone else has to read around.

The seizure limit lives in the prompt, not the QA pass.
A test agent that plays real people, not a QA checklist.
One line makes reduced-motion impossible to regress.

The job isn’t done until you don’t need me in the room anymore.

A finished file isn’t a finished handoff. Every build ends with something a real person can actually run without calling me for every small change, plus an honest look at whether it worked once it shipped.

The handoff is a lesson, taught out loud: A style guide and a real walkthrough, talked through in person. If a question would come up later, I’d rather answer it out loud once than leave it for a support ticket.
Built so someone else can drive it: Small changes, a word swapped, a photo updated, shouldn’t require calling me. The system gets built so the person who owns the site can actually touch it.
The follow-up nobody asks for: I check back in after launch to see if it actually worked. Shipping is a different question. Nobody asks for that call. I make it anyway.

Launch isn’t where the relationship ends.

I built this with you, so I still care what happens to it after. Every client gets a real window afterward to reach me directly if something comes up. Support tickets disappear into a queue. This doesn’t.

A real person on the other end: The channel back to me afterward is the same one we used during the build. It doesn’t route through a support form that disappears into someone else’s inbox.
Aftercare picks up where that window ends: Same direct access, just extended, for anyone who wants ongoing hands-on time instead of a one-off fix.

The work doesn’t stop at launch. Neither do I.

From real rooms to real software.

I spent over ten years in interior design, 3D visualization, and sales, learning how people actually move through the spaces they’re in. Software turned out to be the same job. There’s a gap between what a person means to do and what the machine actually does, and my work lives in that gap, making the software feel like yours instead of the model’s.

Erik Smith, Design Engineer & UX Designer