There is a version of a redesign project I know very well. The client sends over their current site with a message that says something like "it just doesn't feel right anymore" or "it doesn't reflect where we are now." Sometimes there is a more specific complaint — the conversion rate, the bounce rate, the fact that a designer friend told them the typography was off.

I open the site. And within thirty seconds, I can usually name the four things that are wrong.

Not because I am particularly clairvoyant. Because it is always the same four things.

Pattern 1 — The hero section talks about the company, not the visitor

The most common problem on the web, and somehow still the most common problem I see. The hero says something like "Empowering teams to do their best work" or "The platform built for modern businesses." It uses the word "we" a lot. It is vague in a way that sounds polished but communicates nothing.

The person who wrote it was thinking about the company. About what the founders are proud of, what they have built, what makes them different from competitors. All legitimate things to think about — but not what the hero is for.

The hero has one job: make the person who just landed there feel immediately understood. It should name their problem, their context, or their aspiration in language they would use themselves. Not language that sounds good in a board presentation.

When I land on a site and the first sentence could apply to any of fifty other companies in the same category, I know the brief for that section started with "describe what we do" instead of "describe who this is for."

The fix is not a copywriting trick. It is a reorientation. You have to start from the customer, not from the product. That shift affects every word on the page — and usually reveals that the real value proposition was buried in the third paragraph of the "About" section all along.

Pattern 2 — Typography that nobody decided on

This one is subtle and it does a lot of damage.

Most of the time, it did not happen all at once. The site launched with one font stack. Then someone added a section in a slightly different weight. Then a developer picked something that was close enough. Then a marketing page was built by an external agency who used what they had. Then a blog was added and the template came with its own type settings.

Nobody lied. Nobody was negligent. The typography just accumulated.

The result is a site where no one thing looks broken, but the whole thing feels slightly off. The heading on the hero is 48px bold. The heading in the features section is 44px semibold. The card titles are in a different font altogether. The spacing between lines shifts without explanation. A visitor cannot articulate what is wrong — but they feel it as a vague unreliability.

Typography is a system. When it breaks down into a series of individual decisions made in isolation, it stops functioning as a system and starts functioning as noise. The brain registers the inconsistency even when the eye does not consciously catch it.

What I do first when I open a site like this is audit every text style in use. On most sites that need redesigning, I find between eight and fourteen distinct text styles where there should be four or five. That audit alone usually makes the problem undeniable.

Pattern 3 — Visual hierarchy that guides the eye nowhere

Every page has a job. The job of the homepage is usually to get someone to a second page, a form, or a conversation. The job of a pricing page is to get someone to click one of the plans. The job of a case study is to make someone feel confident enough to reach out.

Visual hierarchy is the system that pulls the eye toward the action the page was designed to trigger. Size, weight, contrast, whitespace, color — used deliberately, these tools create a path. The visitor does not have to decide where to look. They are guided.

On the sites I am called in to redesign, the hierarchy is usually absent. Every element has roughly equal visual weight. The CTA button is the same visual prominence as the supporting copy next to it. The section headings compete with the body text. There is a lot of content, and it is all at the same volume.

This happens because each element was added with the question "does this look good?" rather than "does this move the visitor toward the goal?" Both questions are valid. But only one of them produces a page that converts.

The fix requires being willing to make some things deliberately smaller, lighter, and quieter. That feels counterintuitive — why would you reduce the visibility of content you spent time creating? Because the contrast that results is what makes the important things important.

Pattern 4 — A brand that accumulated rather than evolved

This is the most complex pattern and the hardest to fix quickly.

It happens to every company that has been around for more than two or three years. The original brand was built in a hurry, or built well but for a company that no longer exists in the same form. Then the product expanded. The team grew. New people made new materials. The site was updated section by section. Each update was reasonable. None of them were coordinated.

By the time I arrive, the site has three visual languages running in parallel. The original launch aesthetic is still visible in some places. A rebrand attempt from eighteen months ago got halfway implemented. The new marketing team added a section that reflects where the brand wants to go but has not gotten there yet.

The client often describes this as "it feels messy" or "nothing hangs together." What they are describing is a brand that has been added to rather than designed. The individual pieces are not terrible. The accumulation is.

What this pattern usually requires is not a new logo or a new color palette. It requires someone to audit everything, identify which visual language is the strongest, and make a deliberate decision to extend that one and retire the others. That decision is 80% strategic and 20% visual. It is the most important thing I do on projects like this — and it is almost never the thing the client thought they were hiring me for.

Why these patterns persist

None of them are obvious failures. That is the key. Each one arrived through a series of individually reasonable decisions. No one sat down and said "let's make a hero section that ignores the customer" or "let's use twelve different text styles." The problems are the byproduct of a process that optimizes locally — each decision looks fine in isolation — without anyone holding the whole thing together.

The role of a designer on a redesign project is not to add new ideas. It is to look at everything that already exists and identify what is working against itself. Most of the time, the brand is already there. The clarity is already there. It is just buried under the accumulation.

When I find all four of these patterns on the same site — which happens more often than not — what I tell the client is this: the good news is that none of this is broken beyond repair. The problem is not what you built. It is what nobody was watching.