Tell me about Peabody House.

Larry Peabody

Lawrence (Larry) Peabody was a 20th century architect, interior designer, and furniture designer. He was a longstanding design partner and friend of the Richardson family.

Larry was lavishly talented, highly extroverted, and always pushed the Richardson family toward thoughtful, tasteful design. He's the reason several Richardsons went on to study design, whether architectural, interior, or the graphic arts.

Peabody House has proudly given their namesake to the inspiration of Mr. Peabody.

100% of our clients have told us the same thing, "We appreciate that you have design sense in addition to your engineering skills."

We treat design and engineering as one discipline, so there's no "passing of the baton" between teams where crucial information tends to slip through the cracks.

Most, if not all, agencies have a dedicated designer, and dedicated engineer, but rarely a role that is dedicated to the hybrid discipline of design-engineering. This frequently leads to bottlenecks, hours-long handoff meetings, and some pretty messy communication breakdowns between teams, at the expense of the finished deliverables and the budget.

At Peabody House, the designer is the engineer and the engineer is the designer, so nothing gets lost in translation. Our business model is optimized for quality at speed, and our clients spend far less time in meetings explaining what they meant.

A brand world is the all-encompassing feeling that comes from your brand, including the things you may not have thought of. Your end users make snap judgments about everything they see and interact with, from your color palettes and button states, to the background color of your text when you highlight a selection. All of it is connected and all of it makes an impression, whether or not they have he words to describe it. The more cohesive and immersive those details are across your design system, the more credible and trustworthy your brand feels.

Brand worlds go hand-in-hand with design systems. The design systems industry is an estimated $162 billion and counting, and there's a reason every major player in tech has one. Design systems shorten time-to-market, speed up feature delivery, and improve engagement with end users.

Even the smallest teams stand to benefit from both, because a good brand world and design system pay dividends long after launch.

Peabody House is a multi-platform digital studio. Most of our work has been for the web, but we've also created work for experiential trade shows, email, and mobile.

AI helps us do our laundry, but it doesn't create our art. That distinction has always been our stance on AI, and we use it as an automation partner while the ideas and the judgement stay ours. The unusual ideas we push for are rarely what AI was trained on anyway, at least not without heavy guardrails we set ourselves.

Of course, we use the expected AI tools to speed up design and development. We just don't let AI touch a codebase or design system until we've carefully crafted the architecture ourselves, to the point where we can explain it clearly and consistently, and only then does it help with the execution. We take full ownership of our codebases and design systems, and nothing ships without a set of human eyes to verify it.

We like to pin down project goals, high-level strategy, and pain points during kickoff. From there, we run a competitive analysis to see what works within similar brand worlds and where the opportunity is.

Next come the sitemap and wireframes. Clients usually take this opportunity to rethink how their users move through the site, and we've partnered well with content strategists here when the work calls for it.

Then comes art direction, where we present 2 distinct style directions, each calibrated to the brand's aspirations. The client selects one, and that choice becomes the foundation for the design system and brand world. The deliverable at this stage is typically a homepage paired with a rudimentary component set. Because our studio lives at the intersection of design and engineering, this phase regularly includes code and animation studies, so nobody has to describe the motion design with flailing hand gestures.

From there, we build out the full design system, with components for interior pages, detail pages, forms, and beyond. We document every pattern and the reasoning behind it, so what we hand off scales, holds up across teams, and gives developers something they can actually build from.

All the time. We've handled our fair share of white-label agency work and are frequently given access to agency systems, email addresses, etc. so we can partner up and get the job done. We've spent many years inside agencies, both as the vendor and as the team bringing vendors in, and we've worked in Slack, MS Teams, overkill email chains, the whole gamut.

We aim to start every project no later than 1 week after signoff. We keep a careful schedule so we don't overbook, and we're always upfront with clients when a few overlapping projects start tightening our bandwidth.