WebinsaneBrand & positioning
Lead with who.
We deleted some of our best interaction work. The portfolio got stronger.
Until last month, the work section of our site was a gallery. Six case studies, each opening into a dialog of images, a shader on every card, swipes, sound. It was some of the best interaction work we had shipped, and I was fond of it. We deleted it.
In its place is a section called Clients. Five names rise through the frame one at a time: Pilatus Aircraft, ScholarshipOwl, PayStubs, Degen Platform, Miners of Mars. Each comes with an industry, a city and one sentence about who they are. Not what we did for them. Who they are.
It is a small change on screen and a large one in how an agency portfolio argues for itself, so it is worth explaining.
Buyers ask about names, not process.
I started paying attention to how people actually used the gallery, and to how they talked about it afterwards. Visitors opened one or two case studies, looked at the first image, and closed them. On calls, nobody ever brought up our process. They brought up names. You worked with Pilatus?
That question is the real one. Someone arriving on an agency site wants to know, before anything else, whether people like them have trusted this studio with something that mattered. A case study answers on its fifth screen. A client profile answers on its first line. Process still matters enormously, because it is how the work gets good. But it is the second conversation, not the first.
The discipline is in the single line.
Each profile now carries the organisation’s name as it calls itself, its industry (aviation, education, fintech, Web3 education, digital collectibles, circular fashion) and its location: Stans, Wilmington, Dubai, Belgrade. For a studio that works worldwide from Serbia, geography is part of the credibility.
Then one sentence about the client. Switzerland’s aircraft manufacturer since 1939. A 7,000-piece NFT universe that sold out in 45 minutes. The client’s significance, stated as fact, and nothing else on screen.
Writing that sentence about them rather than about the project changed the tone of the entire section. It stopped being a studio talking about itself and became a record of companies that chose it. That is a more confident position, and, I think, a more honest one.
Machines read portfolios now, too.
The second reason was search, and increasingly AI search. When someone asks an assistant which design agencies have worked in aviation, the answer is assembled from structured facts: organisation, industry, location, relationship. Captions locked inside an image dialog are close to invisible to that process. A list of named organisations with industries and cities is precisely its shape.
So each profile is published three times, as the same facts. Once on screen. Once as structured data in the page, as a list of organisations. And once in plain text in the site’s llms.txt, the file written for AI assistants. One source, three readers. The wider approach is in Most readers never run your JavaScript.
The stories moved; they didn’t disappear.
None of the case-study writing was thrown away. The long account of each project now lives in text: the stakeholder workshops in Stans that shaped the Pilatus configurator, the world-building behind Miners of Mars. There it can be read at length, quoted and indexed. The images that were hidden inside a dialog are listed in the sitemap with captions, so they can be found on their own terms. The homepage got shorter. The evidence got easier to reach.
Should every agency do this?
If your clients are recognisable, I would lead with them and move the process into writing. If they are not yet recognisable, the format still works, but the one line has to carry more weight. Make it a number or an outcome rather than an adjective. And whichever you choose, make sure a machine can read it. A growing share of your next clients will meet you first through an answer, not a homepage.
We gave up some interaction work we were proud of. What we got back was a portfolio that answers the first question first.
Asked often.
Should a design agency website show case studies or a client list?
Lead with who you have worked for, because buyers judge credibility from client names in seconds, and publish the long-form project stories as readable, indexable text rather than image galleries.
What should a client profile include?
The client’s name, industry and location, and one factual sentence about why the client is notable. Project detail belongs in a separate long-form write-up.
How do AI assistants find an agency’s clients?
From plain, structured facts: organisation names, industries and locations in visible text, schema.org markup and files like llms.txt. Captions inside image galleries are rarely read.