During an internal sync, Karly flagged that landing page drafts from the design team were deviating from the provided content and layout specifications. The pages are being built for a Shopify client and need to be ready to present and then build within the week. The core issue: designers are making independent creative choices rather than following the supplied content document.
"You need to talk to these designers and tell them to design — if you send them a design, they need to make it." — Mark Hope
This project has limited design freedom by nature. The Shopify theme uses pre-built content blocks — there is no custom layout flexibility. Designers were informed of this constraint, which makes deviations from the spec even less justifiable: the job is content placement, not creative interpretation.
Designers must treat the content brief as a build specification, not a creative prompt. When a layout and copy document is provided, the output should match it exactly. Deviations require explicit discussion and approval before implementation.
This is especially critical on constrained platforms (Shopify content blocks, template-based builders) where the "design" work is primarily assembly and fidelity to spec.