Marketing agency for architects and design studios

For an architecture or design practice, your portfolio is everything and your website is where it lives. Prospective clients, competition organisers and collaborators judge you on it in seconds. Cornerstone builds the digital presence that shows design practices at the level they actually work.

The difficulty is that two audiences want opposite things from the same page. A peer, a competition panel or a collaborator wants the work presented cleanly and without commentary. A prospective client with a live project wants to know whether you have done this building type before, under what constraints, and whether the practice is the right size to take it on. Most practice websites are built entirely for the first audience.

The design practice challenge

Design studios have a paradox. You produce some of the most visually considered work in any industry, then present it on a website that does it no justice, or one so minimal that Google cannot understand it and clients cannot navigate it. Beautiful and findable are not opposites, but most practice websites pick one.

The mechanics are worth stating plainly, because they are rarely explained. Search engines and AI systems work with text. A project page carrying nine considered photographs and eleven words of caption offers nothing to read, so it is treated as close to empty. And project names are not searches: nobody types the name of a scheme they have never heard of. They type the building type, the sector, the constraint and the place.

How we help architecture and design studios

What this looks like in practice

Nothing about the portfolio changes. The images stay exactly as they are, at the size and quality they deserve. What gets added is text: a paragraph on the brief, a paragraph on the constraint, the building type and floor area, and two or three paragraphs on how it was resolved. That is perhaps an hour per project, and it is the whole difference between a page that ranks and one that does not.

The other half is turning coverage into something durable. Architecture is one of the few parts of this sector where the press genuinely wants the work. Write the project up on your own site first, then approach editors with somewhere to point them, because a piece of coverage linking to a page you own is worth many times one that mentions you and links nowhere.

We come from architectural photography ourselves, so we understand design practices from the inside: how the work should be shown, and how to make it perform without stripping out what makes it good.