Making hardware legible.
A defense manufacturer with a hard-to-explain product, no usable photography, and a category where every claim is a compliance exposure.
The ask
A defense manufacturer selling to international government buyers had a genuinely hard-to-explain product, no usable photography, and a category where every claim is a compliance exposure. Everything a buyer would judge them by had to be made from scratch, and none of it could be invented.
What I made
Produced and art-directed a two-day photo shoot: shop floor, assembly, quality control, staff portraits, product. A website design system built as locked HTML exemplars rather than static comps. Copy and content architecture for ten pages. SEO keyword strategy. Launch plan. And the governance around all of it: a claims blocklist, a competitor-naming restriction, and a publication-review gate the client signed at every stage.
The call
We could have spent the whole shoot on the product, and I think that is what everyone expected, but the thing a government buyer is really deciding is whether these people can build the same part again next year and the year after that. So we shot the floor. The inspection bench, a mill cutting a fixture plate, trays of barrel clamps waiting on assembly, the people who make them. The product frames are in there and they are good, but they are not doing the convincing on their own.
Outcome
Ten pages, four rounds of client copy review, and a photo library the client now owns outright. Launching September 2026.