From Sketch to Site: The Tangison Process

Every studio has a process. Some studios document it. Some do not. Documenting the process serves two purposes. It lets clients know what to expect. It lets the studio itself check whether the work is actually following the process or has drifted into ad-hoc mode.

Here is ours. Five phases, from the first conversation to the live site. The phases are not strictly linear. They loop back. But every project moves through all of them.

Discovery is listening first. Interview the stakeholders. Review the existing material. Read the competitor landscape. Frame the problem in one sentence before proposing a solution.

Most projects that fail do so because discovery was skipped. The studio starts building before it understands the problem. Two months later, the product launches and does not solve the problem the organization actually had. Discovery is the phase that prevents that failure mode.

Brand comes before wireframes. Define the voice, the color system, the typography, the visual direction. These decisions shape every subsequent decision. A site built without brand decisions is a site that has to be redesigned later.

For projects with an existing brand, this phase is about applying the brand to the digital surface. For projects without one, this phase is about defining the brand. Either way, the brand decisions are made before the layout decisions.

Architecture is mapping the routes, the user journeys, the content structure. The sitemap. The page hierarchy. The navigation. The conversion paths. The site architecture is the skeleton. Everything else hangs on it.

Architecture is also where the content strategy lives. Which pages exist, what each page is for, what each page says. A site with weak architecture cannot be rescued by good design. A site with strong architecture can survive design that is merely competent.

Build is implementation. The design system gets built. The routes get implemented. The integrations get connected. The content gets written. The tests get written. The build happens against the architecture and the brand, not against improvised decisions.

Build is where most of the time goes. It is also where most of the discipline is required. It is easy to add scope during build. It is hard to remove it. The brief and the architecture are what keep build focused.

Launch is type-check, lint, build, test, audit, deploy. The site is verified against the acceptance criteria before it ships. The launch is not the end of the work. It is the start of the live phase, where the site meets real users and real conditions.

Post-launch audit closes the loop. What does the live site actually do under real traffic? What does the analytics say? What does the accessibility audit say? The findings feed back into the next iteration. The process restarts.

The process is not linear. It loops. Architecture sends questions back to discovery. Build sends questions back to architecture. Launch sends questions back to build. But every project moves through these five phases. Skipping any of them produces a worse result.