Samia

I've designed 300+ recruitment client websites over the past 5 years, spanning Australia, Europe, and the UK, with an estimated 95% client sign-off rate on first design approvals. That volume taught me how to decode what a client actually needed, because almost every client wanted the same underlying thing: to look as strong as, or stronger than, their competitors.

Getting there started with understanding their positioning: how they presented themselves, who they were up against, what actually differentiated them, and how that gap showed up or didn't, online. The method behind that rate was simple but deliberate: deep research into where a client stood in their market, and heavy questioning during discovery to understand where the business was heading.

The mood board was where all of that came together, a collaborative session with the client to align on direction before any high-fidelity design work started. The result: most projects reached sign-off on the first design reveal, with minimal revision needed after.

In 2020, management noticed I was quick and effective at flagging QA issues, and asked me to lead the process from the design side, partnering with a developer who did the same on their end. This meant running UI/UX quality checks across all website builds, including for government clients where accessibility carried extra weight, and overseeing final rollout in line with WCAG 2.1 AA requirements.

Through this partnership, the development QA lead and I created a checklist covering the fixes that came up most often, which meant each designer could QA their own site against a consistent standard, rather than every check depending on the two of us.

For clients who required it, we engaged with a third-party tool (ReciteMe) alongside our own design decisions around text hierarchy and colour, while the technical side of accessibility, semantic markup, ARIA labels and more, was covered on the development end.

Towards the end of 2023, I was wanting to build a stronger business acumen. This resulted in me joining a cross-team Sales × Design initiative that scoped new client work directly from support tickets, flagging redesign and new-feature requests and turning them into design projects. At its peak, this ran alongside my regular design workload for a combined total of 21 active projects, which meant sourcing and coordinating available developers and designers across the team as well as delivering the design work myself.

Managing that volume without dropping design quality meant the same discovery process from every other project still applied, even under a heavier load.

I noticed a recurring gap across recruitment clients: their website, socials, and brand collateral often looked like they belonged to different companies. Some had no social presence at all. Others looked close enough to their competitors that there was nothing to set them apart. On top of that, newer recruitment agencies were often priced out of proper branding altogether, needing something affordable that still gave them a real identity.

To solve for both problems, and to prove the offering out before taking it to enterprise clients, I developed two brand service tiers as a testing ground. The first, a Foundation package, gave newer agencies a logo, colour palette, typography, and a one-page brand sheet, an affordable way to walk away with a real identity instead of nothing. The second, a full brand system, was built for agencies wanting positioning that would hold up over time: multi-page sites, brand collateral, and defined messaging, mission, vision, and approach, designed to stay consistent as the business grew.

This second tier also included brand workshops with clients and internal stakeholders, translating strategic insights into practical systems. Canva was new to the team at the time, I pitched it as part of the brand service offering and helped the team learn it, building out brand templates and brand guides so clients could self-manage their own social media and job posts going forward. Because the templates were locked to the brand system, clients stayed consistent by design, rather than drifting the way ad hoc posts often do. It became such an easy system to maintain that most clients stuck with it long after handoff.

Functionn was the first client through this offering. I led the project end to end, building the brand framework the team followed, the timeline and milestones for each stage, what got presented to the client, and how.

The design team produced three mood-board concepts, which I presented to the client. He chose the concept that felt the most mature and professional, over the others which read as a little too young, aligning with how he wanted to maintain the business's vision, mission, and values.

From there, two team members handled the brand identity and collateral production, while I helped the client learn to navigate and use their new Canva social templates. Once the brand project wrapped and the client was happy with the direction, we moved into the website design phase, which I led from start to finish. Across roughly 5 to 8 projects, this two-tier structure gave us the results and process needed before considering it for enterprise-level clients.

I noticed the tools we were working with, Sketch and Zeplin, were becoming a bottleneck rather than a help. There was no developer mode to bridge design and build, SVG exports were unreliable, and there was no easy way to show a client what an animation or interaction would actually feel like before it was built. Sign-off conversations were happening on static screens, with a lot left to imagination, and issues that should have been caught early were only surfacing in QA instead.

I led the team's move to Figma, introducing component libraries and interactive prototyping in place of the old workflow. Auto Layout made it possible to build genuinely reusable components, buttons, navigation, carousels, and cards that resized and adapted properly, rather than static elements that needed rebuilding for every variation. This significantly reduced the time required to build out mobile screens for complex layouts, and gave designers a developer's mindset for approaching layout, sharpening their UX thinking in the process.

For clients, this meant seeing video hero banners, motion, and interaction suggestions directly in the prototype, rather than trying to picture them from a static handoff. For developers, it meant clean developer mode access, along with reliable interaction handoffs and asset exports, replacing a process that had relied on workarounds. Style guides and design systems became easier to build and hand over as a result.

The impact showed up earliest in sign-off: with clients and developers both seeing the same interactive prototype, more issues were caught and resolved before build, rather than being raised as fixes in QA after the fact.

In 2021, The Language Arts Studio's founder and principal, Joanna, had to shut her physical studio down. Overnight, her business became dependent on an existing Facebook page and a phone full of WhatsApp messages she was answering one by one.

By late 2023, she'd found a new space, smaller, but hers. Plants, warm furniture, her giant logo signage mounted above it all. She approached me wanting a website, and that new space became the blueprint for everything that came next.

Given that people had grown hesitant towards physical experiences post-COVID, I suggested something specific: don't just show the studio, recreate the feeling of standing in it. With parents as the primary audience, it was just as important to make their engagement quick and meaningful i.e. every digital touchpoint needed to carry the same colours, warmth, and trust she'd already built in person.

That idea became the foundation of the site: a brand palette curated from the studio's own warm, friendly tones, and a structure built to walk parents through the studio's approach, values, services, pricing, and testimonials. Real photography and video from the space and the children's and teachers activities backed every section, so nothing on the site stood in for the real thing.

Budget was tight, so the booking journey had to earn its keep without costing anything to run. Under each pricing tier, split for her Malaysia and Singapore audiences, sat a WhatsApp button pre-loaded with the right message. Every CTA followed the same pattern, just with a different message behind each click. No forms, no back-and-forth, no small talk, just click and book.

The site never left its Webflow staging link. It still hasn't, even now. That came with a catch: staging links attract bots, especially around forms. So the hiring page got a Tally form embed instead, and has reported zero bot issues to date. On the technical side, I verified her business email through Google Search Console and linked it to her Google Business Profile, so a parent searching for the studio by name on Google finds the website sitting right alongside the listing.

What happened next is the part that matters. Enquiries that used to trickle in once or twice every four months turned into a steady 3 to 5 a month, a shift she estimated at 35% within three months, 60% within six. The team grew from one teacher to two by early 2024, then five by 2026.

By early 2026, Joanna was hosting free workshop events and needed a page to list them with their own booking forms. Since the workshops were free with limited seating, I kept it native to Webflow using form modals, with every form sitting behind a button click in an overlay, and left the page out of the site's navigation and sitemap entirely to limit bot exposure and unwanted traffic.

As her business grew and she began hosting more events, I expanded the brand to support it: Instagram-first Canva templates to grow her presence there, along with t-shirts, CNY ang pow packet artwork, and a set of encouragement stickers. Since the t-shirts would be worn by her own teachers day-to-day, adding a QR code there was an easy call, one that also carried through to the ang pow packets and one of the stickers, each linking back to the same site.

Separately, she's noted that starting in 2026, new families are increasingly finding her through AI recommendations, which tracks with her Google reviews now sitting at five stars across 63+ of them. The push to collect more reviews was her own initiative, not mine, but it's one I've since carried forward with other clients: a strong Google Business Profile is increasingly what feeds AI-driven discovery of a business.