Count first. Draw second. Write it all down.
Every Halden project follows the same five phases, whether it's a hospital's signs or a grid operator's forecasting tool. Here is what happens in each one and what you hold at the end.
- Phases
- 5
- Typical length
- 14 weeks
- Reviews
- Every Thursday
- Hand-over
- Source and rationale
Four principles
Written in 2017, unchanged since.
- M.01
Count before you draw
We time journeys, read support tickets and pull the logs before anyone opens a design file. The first deliverable is always a number.
- M.02
Design in the real material
Signs get printed at full size and hung where they'll go. Dashboards get built on real records. Mockups of mockups don't count.
- M.03
Test with strangers
Staff know too much. We test with first-time visitors and new hires, and we report the failures before the wins.
- M.04
Write it all down
Every decision gets a sentence on why. The rationale ships with the source, so the third person to edit the system understands the first.
Five phases on a fourteen-week project
Longer projects stretch phases 2 and 3; the order never changes.
- 01
Survey
Site walks, journey timing, data pulls and interviews. Ends with a findings memo and one headline number.
Weeks 1 to 22 wk - 02
Directions
Three directions in week three, each tested against the survey's number. One goes forward by week five.
Weeks 3 to 53 wk - 03
System
The full system in its real material: every sign type, every screen, every chart template.
Weeks 5 to 95 wk - 04
Test and build
Tests with strangers from week seven; the build follows what they show. We publish every failed test to you.
Weeks 7 to 126 wk - 05
Hand-over
Source, tokens, production files, the written rationale and two half-day sessions with your team.
Weeks 12 to 143 wk
What you hold at the end
48pp
Everything we made, in formats you can open in ten years
- Drawings
- SVG and PDF/X
- Type
- OTF, WOFF2, UFO sources
- Code
- Git repository, MIT or yours
- Tokens
- JSON and CSS
- Data
- CSV with a data dictionary
A Thursday review
Forty minutes, the same agenda every week: what we learned, what we decided, what we need from you.
A one-page status
Hours used against the fee, the next milestone and any risk, in plain words.
Ninety days of answers
Questions about the system are free for three months after hand-over. Changes are a retainer.
How the method changed
Each change came from a project that went wrong.
The sign-schedule tool goes open source
The generator behind every Halden sign family, released under MIT with its documentation.
A data audit before every data quote
After P-032 needed 34% more engineering than we quoted, we check the client's data before the fee is final.
Accessibility audits on everything we ship
Every interface and every PDF since then has passed WCAG 2.2 AA before hand-over.
The written rationale becomes a deliverable
A client's in-house team rebuilt our sign system and undid half of it. The rationale has shipped with every project since.
Field tests with strangers
We stopped testing with client staff after they found every sign we hung. First-time visitors found 40% fewer.
See the method on your own system.
The three-week audit is phase one on its own: we count, you get the number and the fix list.