In typical project delivery, the process is linear. Designers create a flawless vision, package it up, and pass it over to development. At that point, the design team wipe their hands of it, and this is exactly where great design starts to fall apart.

Ultimately, the final product will fall short of the approved designs/ concept. The padding might be off, the menu sluggish and the brand consistency is lost.

At Rareloop, we recognised this painful disconnect years ago and built a philosophy around eliminating it. We don’t believe in the traditional ‘design hand-off’. Instead, we believe in multi-discipline teams who work side-by-slide throughout every stage of a project, designers and developers collaborating continuously, focused on delivering the best possible outcome.

Our approach

Feasibility First

Before ideas become too polished or precious, our designers share early concepts with our development team. These conversations are quick, informal, and incredibly valuable.

• Can this be built within budget?
• Is this interaction feasible on the chosen platform?
• Is there a smarter or more scalable way to achieve the same outcome?

A 15-minute chat can save 15 hours of re-design later. It protects project timelines, prevents hidden blockers, and ensures design ambition is grounded in technical reality, without compromising the vision.

Crucially, our designers don’t write code, but they have a deep understanding of the medium. They stay up-to-date with platform standards, accessibility best practice, performance considerations, and how content will actually be managed in the CMS. This shared understanding makes conversations with developers far more efficient and productive,

The single source of truth

While many design systems are simply collections of guidelines and components, ours goes much deeper. We have created a single source of truth that captures the underlying intent behind every element. This includes the codified logic for spacing, complex interaction patterns, component states, and embedded accessibility rules.

The design system becomes a shared language between design and development, removing ambiguity and eliminating guesswork. Instead of developers trying to interpret colours or manually recreate spacing from a static mock-up, these values can be pulled directly from the design system into the codebase.

This approach removes human error, speeds up development, and ensures everything is implemented exactly as intended. It also means that when something changes, let’s say a colour, we update it once in the design system and that update flows everywhere.

By giving design and development a common language, we eliminate guesswork, prevent inconsistencies, and ensure the final build reflects the true design intent, not an interpretation of it.

Scalable foundations

The benefit of our designers and developers being involved from day one, is that we consider not just what we’re building now, but what you’ll need in six months, a year, or three years down the line. We design flexible, scalable architecture early, so new features slot in without friction or expensive reworks. It prevents technical debt, avoids rigid layouts and keeps your product future-ready.

It’s design and development thinking together, not reacting in isolation.

Our day-to-day collaboration

To us, great collaboration is a set of habits we’ve built over time and with practice.

The early feasibility check

Every concept or major feature is discussed before it’s fully fleshed out. A designer might present a wireframe and ask the developers if it could be developed within the time-frame. These conversations happen long before a design gets too far, allowing the team to solve problems early.

The micro build review

As the developers are actively coding and building the product, they frequently loop the designer in. It’s not a formal QA session; it’s a quick message saying ‘how should this input field handle a two-line error message?’ or ‘is the border radius correct here?’. This process ensures that the small things are correct, preventing tiny design inconsistencies from creeping into the final product and eroding the overall quality.

This proven, integrated process results in digital products that are not only visually stunning and intuitive to use, but are delivered efficiently, protecting both your budget and your brand identity.

What happens when we’re given external designs?

We’re sometimes asked to implement designs created by the client or a third-party. While we absolutely can do that, we’ve found it doesn’t actually save us any time. Most external designers aren’t used to building for the web in a systemised, component-driven way. Developers are left to interpret unclear patterns, make micro-decisions, rebuild inconsistencies, and translate static visuals into functional, reusable components.

It works, but it’s less efficient, and the result is often less consistent than when design and development collaborate from the outset.

Why it matters

Out integrated process results in digital products that:

• Look beautiful and intentional
• Behave consistency and intuitively
• Scale without friction
• Launch on time and on budget
• Faithfully reflect the brand in every interaction.

Great design needs collaboration, not a handoff.