The most expensive sentence in a digital project is “we will figure it out in development.” It means the design was a picture of a website, not a website. Someone will interpret the picture. They will be wrong in small ways that add up to a different company.
Same room, same file
We keep engineers in the layout from the first serious composition. If a type size cannot be a type size, if a crop cannot be a crop, if a CMS cannot hold the pattern, the design changes — in the design, not as a “technical constraint” slide at the end.
Motion is part of the build, not a library dropped on a static page. Accessibility is part of the design, not a checklist after launch. Performance is a reason to cut, not a reason to compress a mistake.
Honest CMS
A publishing model has to match how the company actually writes. A generic blog with a hero field will produce generic pages. We would rather have fewer fields and a site that still looks like itself on the twentieth entry.