Website Redesign Direction
Category: website
Sources: raw/elon-musk-x-style-tone-voice-design-guide-2026-08-16.md, Glen chat direction 2026-08-16 and 2026-08-17, docs/superpowers/specs/2026-08-16-website-redesign-architecture-design.md, MASTER-BUSINESS-PLAN.md (Trace Launch project, fetched 2026-08-23 — public presentation policies)
Confidence: high
Last Updated: 2026-08-23
The site currently live at tracetechnical.co.uk (digital-home/frontend/) is the old website. A full redesign and reformat is planned. The build has not started — this article is the settled direction for when it does, not a description of anything currently live.
Build Isolation (hard rule)
- Nothing from redesign work is ever pushed, committed, or overwritten onto the live site. The old website keeps running unchanged until Glen says otherwise.
- No layout, section, or page structure is cloned or ported from the old website into the redesign. The old website is not the design reference here — it is what's being replaced.
- Every website design task in the redesign is built directly and verified by hand — build the section or page, preview it in the running dev server, and review it against the architecture spec and this article. No design tool (Impeccable,
/design-cycle) sits in this process.
Design Process
Every website design task in the redesign, including any new page, is built directly and reviewed by hand: build the section or page in the running dev server, preview it, and check it against Positioning, this article, and the architecture spec's per-page content requirements. No design tool sits in this process.
Mode: every Trace public page is there for the visitor to decide and act (book a call, pick a service), not to operate a tool or read documentation. That covers every page, not just the homepage, for a one-person consultancy selling services.
Design tokens (colours, typography, component treatments, spacing, elevation) live in DESIGN.md at the repo root, maintained by hand — updated directly whenever the palette, components, or rules change.
AI usage requires a public policy, whenever the diagnosis tool that shows visitors an AI-generated result is actually built (the tool itself was previously called "Ask the Trace Brand Brain" in this article — that name is retired along with "Trace Brand Brain"/"the Brand system"; the master plan's naming is Trace Core, and today Trace Core carries no AI at all, so there is no AI-generated result to disclose yet — see Systems And Ai Stance). Once any AI-generated result reaches a visitor, the redesign's legal/system pages need a public AI usage policy alongside Privacy, Cookies and Terms — covering what the tool does, its designed-to (not live-learning) framing, data handling, and that Glen reviews and owns every client-specific outcome.
Tone and Voice Direction
This is now the live tone and voice direction for the whole business, not just the website — see Voice Guide's Core Direction, which this article informed. It replaced the previous dark-arts persuasion mandate for public copy entirely: there is no persuasion-licensed register anymore, on the redesign or anywhere else.
Inspired by the Musk/X communication approach (Tesla, SpaceX, xAI): a capable, opinionated, high-agency person explaining something important directly to another intelligent person. Confident without arrogance, ambitious without empty hype, precise without being clinical.
- Restrained, not decorated. No unnecessary decoration, no corporate fluff.
- Product and mission primacy over persuasive rhetoric. The work and the method do the convincing; copy doesn't have to work hard to compensate. For Trace specifically, since there's no product to photograph the way a car or a rocket carries a page, primacy means leading with proof and specifics (real numbers, real boundaries, real detail) rather than visual spectacle.
- Short, clear, declarative language. Say the thing plainly. Simple, accurate words over inflated ones.
- Ambition grounded in demonstrated capability or first-principles logic. Bold claims are fine when the reasoning or evidence is right there with them, never floating free of it.
- Respect for the reader's intelligence and attention. No hand-holding, no over-explaining the obvious, no padding.
- Minimal reliance on traditional marketing language. Persuasion is secondary to clarity and demonstration.
- Personality and brand image are not lost — they're layered in after content is secured, never before. Get the substance right first; the voice and creative texture come after, not as a substitute for it.
Public Presentation Policies
Business-level rules for anything public, from the master plan. (How they're executed visually is a design-brief matter, not this article's job.)
- The single conversion action is booking a call (cal.com). Every public journey ends there.
- Every price is public, and each price appears once: on the service's own page, and at the diagnosis tool's recommendation moment. Never in footers, navigation, cards or comparison tables. See Offer Architecture's Publishing Rule for the pricing decision itself; this is the placement rule for wherever it's shown.
- No phone number, anywhere. No contact page; a short form (service, product/market, urgency) sits under the booking calendar.
- Never public: negative scope statements, Trace Brain (or any brain name), Tara or any succession content, the configurator's internals. (Hearing protection was on this list until 2026-08-26, when Glen swapped it in for head protection as a public category on the About page — see Positioning.)
Visual Direction
- No photography anywhere on the redesigned site, except Glen's founder-credibility photo (AI-glitch treatment) — the one named exception, in scope on Home and About. No stock imagery, no product photography, no lifestyle imagery.
- No gradients anywhere, no decorative fill of any kind. Solid grounds only — dark backgrounds, hairline rules, typography and whitespace carry every section. The hero's interactive brain/motorcycle-jacket morph graphic is the one confirmed exception (a functional, cursor-reactive graphic, not decoration).