Framer Website · Commercial Diplomacy · Brussels · Warsaw · Tallinn
A firm with no website,
and a contract waiting to be signed.
The Diplomatic Platform advises corporations and investors where corporate strategy meets political power. I designed and built their first site in Framer - live before the signing.
Context
The firm existed. Its public presence did not.
The Diplomatic Platform advises corporations, investors and institutions on commercial diplomacy: government relations, political intelligence, media, and regulated markets. Its people come from the EU, NATO, European governments and international media, working out of Brussels, Warsaw and Tallinn.
Problem
A launch, not a redesign - with a date underneath it.
The audience is senior enough that an unconvincing website is a reason not to reply, and the brief said so plainly: premium, minimal, and credible to the people who run large companies.
The brand manual had no logo mark. The films that would carry the entire site were still being shot - a suspended stone that falls, shatters and reassembles in reverse, filmed by Anna Ryń rather than generated, because the client did not want a site that looked like it came out of an AI tool. The firm publishes reports continuously, so the site could not be something only I could update. And the brief ruled out the obvious layout for a firm whose value is its people: no faces on the front page.
Underneath all of it was a date. The site had to exist before a contract was signed.
This was not a project that could slip a month.
Decisions
Six calls that shaped the site.
They came for a design. They left with a built site.
The scope on the discovery call was settled: the design was mine, the development would be theirs. I said I build in Framer too, and quoted both ways. They took the build. That decided more than the invoice - the site is carried almost entirely by film and motion, and how those behave is not something a static design file can specify.
Pulling the site back from looking like an art gallery
The films were the best asset this site had, and its biggest risk. Footage of a stone shattering in an industrial hall does not automatically read as a firm advising corporations on regulated markets. The fix was subtraction. Scrolling text effects came out, animation came down, the four words the firm sells on were set in bold static type, and a plain statement of what the firm does moved to the top of the page. The films stayed exactly as they were. Everything competing with them stopped moving.
Serif for headlines, sans-serif for reading
The first version set long copy in the brand serif and it turned into walls of text people skimmed past. The reference we settled on was editorial, where a serif carries authority across a short headline and a sans-serif carries the actual reading. Garamond stayed on the headlines, body copy moved to Cabinet Grotesk, and the accent colour was pulled back to navigation.
Reports as pages, not downloads
The reports had to be found, not just read. The client wanted the text on the page for search rather than locked inside PDFs, and I flagged the other half of it: a library of PDFs grows a Framer plan’s bandwidth bill quickly and quietly. Reports live as page content, and it is now the third most visited page on the site.
A CMS instead of a retainer - and a handover that held
I put two options on the table before the build started: a monthly retainer where I make the changes, or a CMS they operate themselves. The retainer is the recurring invoice. They took the CMS, and it was the right call. I recorded a walkthrough, sat the team through setup, and left them publishing. Their policy analyst has been adding reports since launch day without me.
A logo mark nobody had asked for
The brand manual had none and the site needed one. Rather than hand the blocker back, I took the tilted O out of their logotype and made it the mark.
Result
Live before the contract was signed.
That was the deadline the whole project was built around, and it held. The first full version was ready eight days after kickoff; the domain went live in April.
The first three months of traffic show what the site is being used for: for every two visits to the homepage, one continues to the team or the reports. Average session runs just under two minutes. Search is the largest single source, ahead of LinkedIn and Instagram - for a brand with no online history, being findable at all was the first job.
The clearer signal came after launch.
“The website was the first thing we asked Kacper for. Halfway through the project I wrote to tell him he understood not just what we do, but where we were headed.
It has not been the last thing we asked him for, and that is the only review that matters.”
Zbigniew Jankowski · President, The Diplomatic Platform
“Every question I had went to the one person who had actually built the thing. Our brand manual had no logo mark, so he took the tilted O out of our logotype and gave us one. A strange luxury, and I got used to it far too quickly.”
Julia Smogorzewska · Policy Analyst, The Diplomatic Platform
A firm gets one launch.
Tell me what you’re building. I’ll tell you if I can help.