Space Cowboy Design - Product & UX/UI Design

The brand had a voice. The website didn't.

Introduction

Cannonball Digital is a digital marketing agency based in Sioux Falls, SD and Chicago, IL. They help businesses grow through paid media, SEO, social, email, and creative production. They came to us with a clear problem: their website didn't reflect who they actually were. The brand had personality. The site didn't. We were brought on to redesign the entire thing from the ground up, including a full review of the site's content and copy.

Company

Cannonball Digital

Year

2025

Platform

Web

Role

Co-Designer

Scope of work

Website Redesign • Wireframes • Responsive Design • Copy Review

The Problem

Cannonball positions itself as the anti-corporate agency. Scrappy, direct, results-first. But their existing site read like a template with a logo swap. Nothing about it communicated the energy or confidence the team brought to their actual work.

For an agency built on standing out, the website was blending in.

The content had the same issue. Generic descriptions that could have belonged to any agency. Service pages that listed capabilities without explaining why a client should care. The structure was flat and the hierarchy didn't guide visitors toward action. The goal wasn't a visual refresh. It was a full structural and content overhaul. New sitemap, new visual direction, new copy strategy, and responsive coverage across every breakpoint.

My Role

I worked on this project alongside Thomas Christiansen of Thomas Christiansen Creative. Thomas led the overall design direction, pitching the client on a brutalist approach that became the foundation for the entire site. He owned color, typography, imagery, and the high-fidelity visual language.

My focus was on the structural and responsive side. I built the sitemaps and recommendations that defined how the site would be organized. I designed the wireframes and established responsive breakpoints for mobile and tablet. I also contributed to copy review and content strategy, helping tighten messaging across pages.

One of my key contributions was the oversized typographic headers on interior pages. That decision became a signature element of the entire design.

5 weeks from sitemaps to final mockup delivery.

A large group photo of diverse team members gathered in an industrial-style space with arched ceiling.

Early wireframe establishing layout and content hierarchy.

High-fidelity services page with brutalist visual direction applied.

Collaborators

Thomas Christiansen

Overall design direction, brutalist concept pitch, color, typography, imagery, and high-fidelity mockups. Thomas led the overall design direction from mood boards through final deliverables and pitched the brutalist approach that defined the project.

Cannonball Digital Team

Client stakeholders who provided brand context, content assets, and feedback throughout the engagement. Regular check-ins at each phase kept the project moving on a tight five-week timeline.

I co-designed this project with Thomas, splitting responsibilities to move fast on a tight timeline. The cards to the left break down who owned what.

We stayed aligned through regular check-ins at each phase milestone. Sitemaps got reviewed before wireframes started. Wireframes got approved before high-fidelity began. That handoff rhythm kept five weeks from ever feeling rushed.

space cowboy

Good work takes good partners.

His eye for visual identity gave the wireframes and structure I built something worth looking at. When one person handles structure and another handles the visual layer, the risk is that it feels stitched together. This didn't. The process kept us locked in from day one, and the result reads as one cohesive vision. This project doesn't exist without that partnership.

View Work

Owner

at Thomas Christiansen Creative

Thomas Christiansen

Brand strategist and creative director with over 15 years of experience in branding, web design, and visual identity. His client work spans startups to household names like Dolby. Based in Phoenix, AZ.

space cowboy

Good work takes good partners.

View Work

Owner

at Thomas Christiansen Creative

Thomas Christiansen

Design Direction

When Thomas presented design directions early in the project, the client responded to the brutalist approach. It was the right call. Cannonball's brand voice is direct and unapologetic. A clean, polished agency site would have undercut that.

The brutalist direction gave us room to be bold. High-contrast black and white with punches of yellow. Chunky layout blocks. Illustrated assets mixed with photography. Typography that took up space and didn't apologize for it.

The interior pages leaned even harder into that confidence. Oversized display headers anchored every page, giving visitors an immediate sense of what they were looking at before reading a word of body copy. The service cards used custom illustrations that felt specific to Cannonball rather than pulled from a stock library.

Homepage hero with bold typography and black-and-white photography.

The Process

The engagement followed a structured five-week timeline.

Week 1

Started with sitemaps and recommendations. We mapped the existing site, identified structural gaps, and proposed a new information architecture. Thomas delivered mood boards in parallel, locking the brutalist direction with the client before any screens were designed.

Five-week project timeline from sitemaps through final delivery.

Brand assets and color system established during the mood board phase.

Weeks 2-3

Were wireframes and copy. I built low-fidelity wireframes establishing layout, content hierarchy, and responsive behavior across breakpoints. Simultaneously, we reviewed and tightened copy across every page, making sure the messaging matched the energy of the new visual direction.

Low-fidelity wireframe exploring page structure and navigation.

Contact page with finalized copy and layout.

Weeks 4-5

Moved into high-fidelity mockups. Thomas brought the wireframes to life with the locked visual direction. We delivered mockups in rounds, with client review checkpoints built into the schedule. Final revisions and outstanding pages carried into early April.

Responsive mobile designs across contact, about, and 4A's pages.

Outcomes

The redesigned site launched and is live at cannonball.digital. The final product is a full website redesign covering homepage, services, about, case studies, blog, and contact, with responsive coverage across desktop, tablet, and mobile.

The brutalist direction gave Cannonball a site that actually sounds and looks like them. Bold where their old site was safe. Specific where it used to be generic. The structure guides visitors from what Cannonball does, to proof that it works, to a clear path to get in touch.

Thomas noted the implementation deviated in places from the original mockups, which is common when a separate dev team handles the build. The Figma deliverables shown here represent the intended design as it was handed off.

Finally looked like the agency they already were.