Notes · 25 January 2021
On not redesigning everything in January
January is the worst month to start a redesign. Most of the work that happens this month gets undone in March.
January is the worst month to start a redesign. I say this every year and I will keep saying it.
Most of the work that gets started in January gets undone in March. Not because the January work is bad. Because the rest of the company is also in January. The marketing team is also resetting. The sales team is also resetting. The CEO is also reading the predictions thread on Twitter and getting ideas. The redesign that the studio commits to, in good faith, on January 8th will be in conversation with three or four other redesigns that the rest of the company has commissioned in parallel, and the studio will be the one that reconciles them all by April.
A small recommendation, as someone who has run this loop several times.
If a client asks for a redesign in January, slow them down. Quote a discovery phase. Two to three weeks. Paid. The deliverable is a written assessment of whether a redesign is the right thing to do at all, and if so, when. Most of the time the answer is “yes, but in March”. Sometimes the answer is “no, you need a different intervention”, which is usually a positioning piece, not a visual one.
This costs the studio almost nothing. It saves the client weeks. It often saves the project from being a redesign of the wrong thing.
If you are running a small business and reading this in January because you are thinking about a redesign: wait. Read Marty Neumeier’s Zag again. Re-read your own About page. Talk to three customers about why they bought from you. Then, in March, decide whether the redesign is still the thing you need.
The studios that are good at this know that most of the value they bring to a client is in the slowing-down, not the speeding-up. The redesign, when it happens, is often the smallest piece of the engagement. The hard part was figuring out whether to do it.
The companion pieces on redesigns vs rewrites and quiet redesigns cover the next steps once you have decided a redesign is, actually, the right move. Win Without Pitching is the rigorous version of the slow-down argument, for studios that want it written up more thoroughly than I have written it here.