This is the first edition of the GOODGLYPH studio journal. The idea is simple: every few weeks we write openly about what we built, what we tested, and what's next. It's the real story of a small studio getting its own house in order before asking clients to trust us with theirs. Let's start with where we are now.
01.We're rebuilding our own site
For the past few weeks we've been working on our new website, built from scratch, bilingual. We built it the way we'd build it for a client: our own code, no rented platform, with the files and the content in our hands. We're at the end of the design phase now: the product pages, the demo, and the order flow are built and styled. The back-end and the domain connection come next. It's more work than it looks, but that's exactly the point: if we tell clients a good site is thought through, not improvised, we should prove it on our own first.
02.We started writing guides for small businesses
Alongside that, we laid the foundations of the blog. The first articles are practical guides for small business owners in Romania, written to answer real questions: what a dental clinic's website needs to include (and which CMDR rules matter), how to choose between branding and just a logo, what makes a site actually bring in clients, the anatomy of a landing page that converts, and how to choose a web design agency you can trust. Each article is meant to be useful to someone searching for an answer at eleven at night, before they commission a site.
03.We're getting the Brand Kit ready to launch
The biggest thing we're building is the Brand Kit: a complete brand identity, delivered as a product, in 3 to 5 working days, at a fixed price. Logo, color palette, typography, social media templates, a brand guide and more, personalized for your business. It's made for small businesses that can't afford an agency on a project basis, but don't want a few-euro template that looks like everyone else's.
04.We're looking for our first founding clients
Before we launch publicly, we want to get it right with a small group of founding clients: 5 to 10 businesses who get the full kit free, in exchange for honest, detailed feedback on the whole process. If they love the result, they let us show their logo and the project as an example. It's a fair trade: we test the process for real and improve it, they get a complete brand. If you're interested, we open applications soon and we'll announce it here and on our channels.
05.What we learned this cycle
The clearest thing: building your own brand is a different animal from building someone else's. We caught every spot where a client would get stuck, because we got stuck there ourselves. That's the kind of empathy you don't get from a brief. The second thing: the discipline of turning a service into a product forces you to cut everything that isn't essential. Hard, but healthy.
06.What's next
Short term: finish the back-end, connect the domain, and open the founding-clients program. After that, the public launch, with the first real results on show. We'll be back with edition #2 when there's something to tell.
If you want to follow how a studio gets built from scratch, you're in the right place. You'll also find us on LinkedIn, where we post along the way.
