The whole company, one designer
Most case studies end with “…and then I handed it to engineering.” This one doesn't. I founded a digital services business and took it from blank page to production myself — positioning, brand, design system, copy, and the deployed codebase — working in the terminal with Claude Code as my engineering pair. It is live today at one-source-interactive.com.
The problem
Local service businesses lose customers to a bad — or missing — web presence, and most agencies sell them jargon. One Source Interactive is my answer: modern web design, an AI receptionist offering, and a genuinely useful free website audit for small businesses.
But a brand-new company has a positioning problem of its own: no testimonials, no client logos, no “trusted by 500 companies.” The design challenge was to earn trust without manufacturing it.
Design decisions that did the work
Honesty as the brand system. No invented social proof anywhere. Instead the site earns credibility with specifics: a free audit that names its five evaluation categories up front, and copy that says exactly what gets checked. Evidence beats adjectives.
Spectacle, but readability first. The visual language is dark and futuristic with a real-time 3D hero. When testing showed the 3D scene washing out the headline on mobile, the fix was repositioning and dimming the scene — never shrinking the message. The hierarchy is non-negotiable; the decoration serves it.
Build the shader, skip the dependency. The obvious way to get a 3D hero is to embed a third-party scene. I hand-wrote it in GLSL instead: no third-party runtime, faster first paint, and full control over accessibility behavior — it honors prefers-reduced-motion, pauses off-screen, and reduces GPU work on mobile.
The AI-paired build
I ran the project the way a design-led engineering team would, compressed into one person and an AI pair. My job: direction, design judgment, taste, and review. Claude Code's job: implementation at the speed of conversation. The division of labor is strict — nothing ships on “that should work.” Every claim gets verified against the running product, and every deploy is a deliberate manual release gate so there is a human review step before anything reaches a prospect.
- Design intent survives. No telephone-game handoff: the person who chose the 8px spacing is the person approving the CSS.
- Accessibility is enforced in code, not promised in a spec. The contact form announces errors via an
aria-liveregion; reduced-motion visitors get a still scene. - Performance is a design feature. The site prerenders to static HTML, so search engines see every word of copy without executing JavaScript.
Outcome
A production business site, live and indexed, with working lead capture — designed, written, engineered, and operated by one person. It is a new business, so I won't dress this up with invented metrics; the honest claim is bigger: the entire loop — research, brand, design system, copy, code, deploy — closed by a single designer. That is the capability I bring to client work.
