Greylock Security

Chris Ryan spent 20 years as a prosecutor in Manhattan. His website said almost none of that, and the homepage sent anyone who found it to a WordPress login screen. Everything he’d built was invisible to the people who’d pay for it.

He owned 2 real photographs. The rest was stock skyline, the kind (I’d guess) half the security firms in the country use. And the firm was mid-rename, so even the wordmark was up for grabs.

Reading came before design. A script pulled every page of the old site, plus the archived homepage, and boiled it down to one brief: who the firm is, what it sells, and the 3 assessment products it had been hiding on a subpage. That brief was the plan before a single pixel existed.

Then the parts nobody should spend a week on by hand. 3 directions rendered side by side, wordmark and type options drawn as flat images, and a small pipeline that pulled hundreds of stock candidates for 6 image slots and laid them out on contact sheets. Justin picked, and the script fetched, resized, and credited every photographer.

Midway through, Chris said the copy didn’t sound like him. Fair. So every sentence on the site was checked against his own documents and the old site, and anything we couldn’t trace back to something he’d written came out.