Living Comps

Most digital agencies and web design shops use a traditional design and development process.  We think it’s outdated, inefficient and almost guarantees a sub-par product.  We use “Living Comps.”

The “Traditional” Process

Most agencies like to get clients to sign-off on “wireframes” (that they don’t understand) and then come up with “Roughs” (clients won’t like) and finally “Comps” that end up looking NOTHING like the final product.

The process is incredibly time-consuming and expensive.  It relies on a client with time to spare and an eye for design–neither are a good use of their time.

Have you ever seen an artist’s sketch of a new concept car?  Looks awesome, right!  Then the production model comes out and, though it’s sort of similar, it’s no where near as wicked as the concept.

That’s the traditional process.  It wastes everyone’s time, money, expertise and for what?  A final product that’s no where near as cool as it could have been.

The “Living Comp” Process

We prefer to sit down, shut up and listen in the first, Discovery phase.  Then we disappear and work internally.    We come up with wireframes, roughs, sketches, and fill whiteboards, post-it notes and bar napkins with ideas.  Each are reviewed by our internal professional designers and developers.  The great ideas that meet the needs and vision we got in the Discovery phase bubble to the surface.

After all that, we build a REAL, WORKING website concept.  It’s not the “whole” site.  It’s a just sampling of pages.  However, it allows us to unveil the real thing.  Client’s can play with it.  They can pull it up on different devices.  They can see how the hover animations interact and how the scroll feels.

In our process, we take all the risk.  If a client doesn’t like the living comp, we’ll burn it down and start again.  It happens about 5% of the time and always because there was some sort of miss-communication during the Discovery phase.

Whatever the reason, there is NO ADDITIONAL charges if we missed the mark.

Sound Interesting?  Good.

We think our Living Comp process is pretty cool.  Because of our process, our projects are typically completed 3 to 5 times faster than our competitors, demands far less time from the client, and produces a final product that’s at a very high level of quality.