Reframed

In one breath: The Framing Project frames art and makes mirrors to measure in Sydney: twelve people, two production teams, retail and trade. I joined on the CNC and the bench. In February the ownership changed, one of the three partners left, and the platform he had begun came to me. A job then lived in five places, and every hand-off was typing, by a person or later by a script. I reframed the workshop the way it would frame a piece: what was scattered gets one structure around it on the new platform. On that platform prices are built from real materials and labour, every task has an owner, and one record carries a job from the first click to the invoice. Clients can design and price a piece themselves, which should leave sales time for new leads and complex projects. The website and platform launched on 27 October 2026. The old program runs beside them for two weeks and only finishes the jobs already in it. The page opens on that restructure, then follows it the way a client meets it: the front door, the flows, and the floor.

Where it started

The workshop is a craft business with a software problem. Its clients arrive in two moods, someone with a print in a tube and someone renovating a bathroom, and it sells to trade as well as to homes. In February none of that lived in one place.

I had worked the bench for months before any of this, so I knew where jobs stalled from the inside. Then I sat down with each team and walked their jobs with them, one hand-off at a time. The pattern was the same on every walk: an order updated where the workshop never looked.

How it came to me

In February the ownership changed and one of the three partners left. He had chosen the platform, Odoo, and begun the pricing engine, and InTechual Solutions had built its first custom modules. Nic asked me to take it over. From May I led it as architect and builder, while the owners decided prices, style and how the system should work.

Taking it over meant three jobs before any design. I had to find the gaps in a half-built pricing engine, and move the code repository to my account. I also had to learn the owners’ own picture of how the business runs, so the system would match the way they decide.

The restructure

The deepest change is one no client sees. Quotes used to come from a legacy framing program. It was built for framing, so mirrors and suspended pieces were bent to fit it: their sizes typed into fields meant for artwork, their prices approximations of the work. The new pricing engine builds each price from the materials instead: each at its cut size, plus a labour charge the owners set for each kind of job. That charge lives in a table the owner’s login can edit, one row per kind of job, beside the lead time every client sees, the workshop’s steps with their minutes, and the checks on each step. A price change reaches the website on the next request, with no restart. The same number is built to serve the client, the floor and the books. In the audit on 23 September, the website estimate matched the order line to the cent on 36 of 38 real configurations. The same audit raised five serious problems at the edges.

The engine makes a second change possible, and this one the client sees: routine work can move from the front desk to the client. Every custom piece used to start the same way, with someone taking down the size, the frame and the glass, then configuring the job by hand before a price could go out. In the new studio the client makes those choices, online and at any hour, and the system makes the workshop’s decisions for them: the cut sizes, the backing, the materials the job needs and the labour charge. The aim is that the front desk gets a design to check, and that sales keep their time for new leads and the complex projects that need a person. The studio launched with the site on 27 October.

What the platform is built to do that the workshop couldn’t in February, all of it tested internally before the 27 October launch:

• Quote mirrors from their real materials and labour. Before launch, the guide’s test roles priced metal-framed, timber-framed and suspended mirrors this way.
• Let clients serve themselves. A client designs and prices a piece online at any hour, and it arrives at the front desk as a quote or an order.
• Name an owner for every task. Every recipe names who does it, so a missed hand-off is less likely to stall an order.
• Order glass from the job. Purchase orders are raised from what each job needs.

The front door

In July, before the home page’s first screen was redesigned, it was argued out as eleven concepts in a concept room. Each was a live mock-up in the house palette, built from things true of the company: its own copy and its own mouldings by name. Each was pinned with what it would take to build, who it speaks to, and what could go wrong.

Two Doors won because it was the only concept that split the screen equally between mirrors and framing. The concept room argued that the renovator and the gift buyer would each see themselves in the first second; I did not test that. The couplet keeps it one voice.

Two Doors, explored

It was built. Two Doors became the development site’s home page on 29 July and was refined in September, but it never reached the launched site: a rebuild replaced it on 29 September, four weeks before launch. These are its screens as they stood on 24 September, kept as the record of what was explored.

Both businesses led the menu

One loud colour

Two doors, equal weight

The promise came first

Both businesses led the menu

One loud colour

Two doors, equal weight

Choose a view

• The promise came first. The bar carried three facts: design online, priced as you build; hand-made in the Sydney workshop since 2013; a free design consultation on every project.
• Both businesses led the menu. Mirrors and Framing were the first two words, and each opened a menu that started with designing.
• One loud colour. Start a piece was the only forest button above the fold.
• Two doors, equal weight. Framing on a lit gallery wall, mirrors in a dark room, each with its own way in.
• Choose a view. A three-way switch opened either door to the full width, or kept the split.

The switch and the menus are easier to feel than to describe. This is the September prototype: the screens as they were on 24 September, with the hotspots where the real controls were. Below the doors came three decisions then a price, the gallery, the mirror room, the workshop, the studios, and the close.

September prototype: Two DoorsThe home page as it stood on 24 September 2026, retired on the 29th. Try the view switch under the doors, or open the Mirrors and Framing menus.

theframingproject.com

← BackBoth doorsFraming viewMirrors viewMirrors menuFraming menu

scroll inside the frame

September prototype: on a phoneThe Two Doors home of 24 September 2026, retired on the 29th. Tap the menu or the account icon.

← BackHomeMenuAccount

What shipped: the Gallery direction

From 29 September to 1 October the front end was rebuilt, page by page, from a written brief: the Gallery direction. It opens on one line, “a quiet gallery in a working shop”. The rebuild was front end only, and nothing that worked was allowed to stop working. Two Doors went with it. The live home page shows one piece at a time: a hero of four slides with two ways in, then the workshop, a mirror or a frame chosen in three steps and priced on the page, a featured artist, the brands the workshop has worked with, a featured project, and a close.

Two ways in

Both businesses still lead the menu

One button in the header

Two ways in

Four rooms

• Both businesses still lead the menu. Mirrors and Framing are the first two words, as they were in September, then Trade and Shop.
• One button in the header. Start designing lands on the studio's two doors.
• Two ways in. Design a mirror and Design a frame open their studios directly. A link that already knows what you're making skips the doors.
• Four rooms. The hero turns through four slides, and holds still on a device set to reduce motion.

scroll inside the frame

theframingproject.com.au/custom-framing

The doors came back

The idea came back on 7 October, from me, the morning after the studio review. I asked for two doors as the front of the design studio: one page, framing and printing beside mirrors, at equal width. Start designing lands there, and a link that already knows what you’re making skips it. It was on the development site the same morning, built from the site’s own parts: the section header and two photo cards. The plan I had agreed was a split drawn rather than photographed, but the photo cards stayed, and on 26 October I swapped their pictures for the two the home page’s hero uses. Equal weight survived from Two Doors. The lit wall, the dark mirror room and the couplet did not.

theframingproject.com.au/design-studio

Every screen, mapped

In early September I captured a front-end map: 165 screens, 152 of them web pages at five widths from a 2560-pixel monitor down to a 390-pixel phone, plus six emails and seven print documents. It went through four revisions and laid out eight user flows. Representative pages stood in for the rest: eight of the 189 product pages, four of the 27 category pages, and the studios at their first step. The map named the site’s sections in a gallery vocabulary. The catalogue is the wall, the design applications are the studios, checkout is the gate, what arrives in the inbox is the post, and every document the business sends is on paper.

The map was also a test. It found desktop visitors had no search at all, because a legacy rule hid it above 1280 pixels, and it found the contact card’s mitred corners pushing a phone screen sideways by four pixels. Both were fixed and re-verified before the next revision. It also caught a policy question rather than a bug. The shop’s checkout took the full amount, while the portal’s Pay Now took a deposit, so that went to the owner.

How clients move through it

Start where most clients do: in the studio. The click-through below is the September prototype, the studio as it stood on 24 September, with three or four steps behind each door. The live studios are under Three doors, then two.

September prototype: the studioThe studio of 24 September 2026, three or four steps behind each door, replaced in October. Pick 'Frame art I already have' or 'A mirror', then step through with Next and Back.

theframingproject.com/design-studio

← BackStudioWhat are we making?FrameYour pieceThe frameReviewMirrorYour mirrorThe glassThe finishReview

The other routes, screen by screen. Click any screen to read it full size.

Behind that form, an enquiry now becomes a ticket, and so does an email to the sales inbox; a reply in an old email thread lands on the sender’s open ticket. A website enquiry starts a reply clock of three business days that skips public holidays. One press turns the ticket into a quote that carries the client’s whole email chain, and the sale moves through the pipeline by itself: Quoted when the quote is sent, with a follow-up three business days later, and Won when it is confirmed.

The shop, rebuilt

In September the home page had a voice; the pages behind it didn’t yet. The shop, the product pages, the cart and the checkout had the palette and the type and still lacked the grammar. Simulated walkthroughs of the buy path, as nine kinds of shopper, from a trade buyer ordering six to someone using a screen reader, found three things that stopped the simulated shoppers outright:

• On a phone, carrier prices were cut off mid-number, on the one screen people came to check.
• A stray demo payment button sat above Checkout.
• On the address form, a fast pick of state was silently wiped.

The redesign of 17 September did one thing everywhere: every page of the buy path opened the way the home page did. A script eyebrow, then a serif line at real scale and a short lede, and then the work on warm gesso plates. Checkout stayed core Odoo, with two small scripts added for the address form and the phone buy bar, and no price moved.

BeforeAfter↔

• 

  Before

• 

  After

BeforeAfter↔

What changed, page by page:

• The listing got an arrival. An eyebrow, the title at the home page’s scale, a count, and pieces on 4:5 plates instead of white boxes.
• Sizes became a grid. The chosen size is a forest plaque, and every cell is 44 pixels tall on a phone.
• The cart became a ledger. One loud total, GST named, and the workshop’s three promises under the lines.
• The address step lost its boxes. Fields sit on hairlines, and an empty Confirm now says which fields are missing.
• The thank-you page thanks you, and says what happens next.
• On a phone, the price follows you. A bar holds the size, the price and Add to cart once the real button scrolls away.

A second look also caught the rebuild breaking its own rule. Brass had crept into the step numerals as text, when the design system kept brass for hairlines and the price plaque. They went to walnut.

In late September the mirror shop was rebuilt around one question: the shape. A client filters by room or by style, picks a rectangle, radius corner, pill, arch, round or organic mirror, then its size, frame and colour, with the price on the page. A mirror the list doesn’t hold opens the 3D configurator instead. The Gallery rebuild kept the idea: the live collection is browsed by shape, style or room, with each mirror drawn on a wall.

theframingproject.com/shop/rectangle-mirror

Three doors, then two

In September the site had three design applications: a studio for prints, a frame configurator and a mirror configurator. An audit of all three, on disk and running on the development site, found that the studio was only a router. Four of its five tiles threw the client out into a different application, with a different stepper and a different way of choosing things. The price hid when it should have led. The frame configurator showed no number until its third screen, even though it had already chosen a frame for the client. And the 7.24 MB the frame configurator downloaded before the first decision included a decorative houseplant.

The same audit looked at how other makers sell custom framing, from Framebridge to Vitsœ, and took four ideas from them:

• ask what the client has in hand
• propose a mat in proportion to the art
• suggest mat colours from the uploaded image
• let a finished design become a link you can send

It also kept a counter-case: for an expensive, irreversible object, fewer decisions handled by an expert can feel more luxurious than more decisions handled by a slicker tool. Self-serve has to answer that. Service research calls a client who takes on part of the work a “partial employee” (Mills and Morris, 1986). The studio’s task is to make that part feel like choosing rather than working, and to keep a person within reach for the rest: a free design consultation on every project, and a brief to send instead of designing it live.

The audit also found something worth saying out loud. Among the Australian mirror sellers it checked, custom work was a showroom and phone category, and none offered an online custom-mirror configurator. The workshop’s mirror configurator works in 3D, to three metres.

The fix went onto the development site the same day, as a grammar. It was a step the project passed through, and October replaced it:

• Three or four steps per door. Frame: your piece, the frame, the mat, review. Mirror: your mirror, the glass, the finish, review. Print: your file, crop and size, the paper, review. A standard mount or a frameless mirror needed three, and the print studio showed five dots because its gateway counted as one.
• The price leads. The plaque was always on the wall and read “Pricing your piece…” until the number landed, so both 3D doors showed a price with no clicks at all.
• Defaults instead of blanks. A window mount arrived with its mat already chosen.
• The warehouse voice went. Product counts, stock codes and staff-named collection labels are gone.

In September three simulated personas, a designer, a trade buyer and a first-timer on a phone, walked the doors from scripts over three rounds; the first round was partial. The first-timer’s walk of the frame door raised a list of changes, and they went in the same evening:

• plain words for the mount
• an explicit “Glazing: none, frame only”
• a sentence under Get a Quote saying a framer checks it and emails a link to pay
• a per-metre hint over the catalogue
• a 10.5-pixel floor on type the client must read, on phones

The frame door, July to September

The frame door began in July as a 3D configurator of its own: the client’s piece already framed on a lit wall at the first step, and a price drawn live from the workshop’s own engine. The studio kept the wall and the plaque, and two decisions from that first build.

• Geometry from the real profile. A stylised box would not match a corner sample. By August more than two thousand supplier mouldings had been rebuilt as geometry instead: photographs smart-cropped, cross-sections traced and normal maps generated, so the frame on the wall is the timber that arrives.
• A price that refuses to guess. The configurator re-checks every price against current list prices on each request, and when the pricing engine cannot answer it says so instead of showing a number.

JulySeptember↔

One question at a time, October

On 6 October the team went through the print, frame and mirror studios with me for one hour fifty-two minutes, Nic among them. I recorded it, and the summary held sixty-five decisions and forty-seven actions, each with a minute mark: the order of the steps, LED lighting as a step of its own, “no glazing” offered only for canvas, and the price add-ons on each option taken out because the live total was enough.

The next morning I turned the studio half of it into fifteen decisions of my own, and built them over two days. My rule for all of it was “smart selections only. no bloat offered anywhere.”

• Two doors, not three. Framing and printing became one flow behind one door, and mirrors kept theirs.
• One question per screen. The client first says whether they have the piece or want it printed. After that every step arrives already answered, and the picture and the price stay on screen.
• Steps that don’t apply are skipped, not greyed. A set-back piece has no mat; a canvas has no glass.
• The styles depend on the piece. Paper, canvas, an object and a textile are each offered only the ways they can be framed.
• A design waits for you. A Continue your design card brings back the most recent one.
• An owned piece is fitted in the workshop. The client brings it in or posts it.

The mirror studio kept its own flow in that round. After the review, LED lighting became a step of its own. On 26 October three of the steps were renamed, and the studio launched with five: Your shape, The mirror, LED lighting, The frame finish, and Add & pay.

On 7 October both 3D studios also gained See it on your wall. The studio turns the current design into a 3D model at its real size and hands it to a phone: on a phone it opens a page with a button that places the piece on the wall, and on a desktop it shows a QR code. It has not yet been tried on a real iPhone or Android phone.

theframingproject.com.au/mirror-configurator

The review also left ten ideas out on purpose. Five wait for after launch, among them mat layouts as a flow of their own, photographing your own wall to see the piece on it, and a swivel for suspended mirrors. Five wait until clients ask for them, such as quotes branded for resellers.

After yes

Every mirror is now drawn before it is made. Confirming the order renders a seven-sheet set for the client, a set for the workshop and the cutting files, all from one model, so the client’s sheets and the workshop’s cannot disagree. The job then waits until the client approves the drawings online or the desk records how they approved, and a change after approval issues the next revision and closes the gate again.

On launch day the first mirror order came through the platform: its drawings went to the client by email, the client approved them online, and the workshop order was released in the same second. The first client paid by card online the next evening.

The design language

Until the rebuild that began on 29 September the site ran on an earlier design system, Gallery Direction v3: six colours named for a gallery (Wall, Gesso, Forest, Walnut, Ink and Brass), three typefaces, and rules about where each colour may go. The rebuild’s brief, the Gallery direction of 29 September, used the brand’s own tokens instead: Air for the ground, Forest for the one loud colour, Earth for the ink, Water for the bronze accent, and two darker tones kept for text.

1. 1.

   A quiet gallery in a working shop

   Every screen is held to three words: calm, considered, real.

2. 2.

   Every section opens the same way

   An eyebrow with a short rule, numbered on the home page, then a serif line with at most one phrase in script, and a short lede beside it. The studio’s two doors open this way.

3. 3.

   Frames are squared and quiet

   Corners at 2 pixels, where the September theme had already settled, hairline rules, and no shadows on the interface. The shadows belong to the work.

The system behind the screens

Every screen above sits on one platform: Odoo 19 with its standard apps configured and its own custom modules, among them the pricing engine, co-authored with InTechual Solutions. The client never sees any of this. The blueprint shows what each step a client takes rests on.

Underneath is one record per job. It works as what Star and Griesemer call a boundary object: the same thing reads as a price to the client, a job to the workshop, a balance to dispatch, and a margin to the owner, and nobody types it twice.

Each role sees what its work needs. The front desk quotes and takes payments but never sees a cost or a markup. Only Nic and the administrators can release an unpaid delivery or a held order. Only named approvers can grant a trade account, and the server refuses anyone else. The marketing agency’s login runs the email campaigns and cannot open a ticket, a cost or a client’s correspondence.

On the workshop floor

Once an order confirms itself, the work moves to the people who make it. The staff screens got the same care as the client’s, because a system nobody can use on a busy bench is a cost.

Since 21 October a failed check does more than get written down. The tablet takes a photo and a note, the alert goes to Nic, and the whole order is held: nothing on it can be delivered, installed or picked up, paid or not, until he answers Fixed, Remake or Accept as is, with a note that stays on the record.

Installations run on a board of their own. A sold installation opens one ticket that moves itself from To contact to Done as the job moves, and turns red with its reason when it stalls: not contacted within three business days, a measure date passed, an install quote left unpaid, ready but not booked, or money still owing just before the day. Booking a visit shows the desk the client’s email before it is sent, and is refused while money is owed unless the hold is released.

I made the staff manual with Claude Code. Every task was carried out on screen, as the role that owns it, with a test client, and only then written down. The first edition, on 24 September, ran to fifty pages in four chapters: the front desk, the workshop and dispatch, marketing, and the owner. Edition 5, on 22 October, runs to 83 pages. Each recipe says who does it and when, gives numbered steps with matching screenshots, and ends with a box that says how to check it worked. The bench cards, five in the first edition and eight in the fifth, carry the short version to where the work happens.

Where it goes next

Launch came first, on 27 October 2026.

Industry 4.0 is usually told about factories with robots. For a workshop of twelve it means something plainer: that the business can see what is happening, and later forecast it. The acatech maturity index gives that a scale. I placed the workshop on it afterwards, as a way to read where it stands and what comes next.

Of the four design principles usually given for Industry 4.0 (interconnection, information transparency, technical assistance and decentralised decisions), the platform that launched on 27 October is built around the first three. Decisions stay deliberately with people, except where a rule is simple enough to trust, like the payment gate. Reordering rules stay manual until the first stock take is trusted, and a delivery override stays a person’s decision. The daily price watchdog that went live on 30 July had stopped by 4 August, and the September audit found it. Monitoring needs monitoring too. The next stage is prediction: lead times drawn from each job’s stage history, and the load on each work centre before it arrives.

The newest layer, built on 28 and 29 October, is a daily brief: plain rules that give each person a short list of who is waiting, on what, since when and why. With it comes an AI assistant, in trial, that drafts a reply or a quote for a person to check. It never sends anything and never writes a price; a draft quote is priced by the engine. So far only I can see either of them on production.

How it came together

1. 10 Feb 2026

   The first check

   Nine overdue invoices, no glass ordered. A daily due-date alert was set up the same day. It ran four mornings, and on the 14th I asked for it to stop.
2. 20 Feb

   The ownership changes

   One of the three partners leaves, and the owner asks me for ideas.
3. 21 Feb

   The assessment

   A floor walk written up as a designer would: contamination paths, storage, information flow. A four-phase proposal.
4. Jan to Jul

   Bridges first

   A floor board built for iPads and fed by a scraper, which the floor never adopted (it kept its TV); a scripted browser between the CRM and quoting; a glass order sheet in the supplier’s format. All three were brittle.
5. 30 Apr

   Off the bench

   I move from the CNC and deliveries to the platform, the website and development.
6. May

   The handover

   Thirteen pages of handwritten notes turned into a map of the platform, the code repository moved to my account, and the order history read for patterns.
7. 2 to 5 Jul

   Build it

   I mapped the API of the industry’s framing software and decided to build our own frame door, which prices from the workshop’s own engine and lands an order on its floor. By early July 1,638 supplier mouldings had profiles extracted; the count later passed two thousand.
8. 10 Jul

   The configurators

   The 3D configurator wired to the pricing engine; all five mirror families and the frame priced, confirmed and made into manufacturing orders on the development system.
9. Late Aug

   The site, mapped

   The front end reworked and polished, then every page template captured at five widths through four revisions of the front-end map.
10. 17 to 18 Sep

    Research and redesign

    The buy path walked and rebuilt in the home page’s grammar; the three studios audited, given one grammar, and mapped as one flow.
11. 23 to 24 Sep

    The guide

    Every staff task carried out on screen and written down, with ten problems fixed on the way.
12. 29 Sep to 1 Oct

    The Gallery rebuild

    The front end rebuilt page by page from a written brief. Two Doors leaves the home page.
13. 1 to 2 Oct

    Overnight audit

    All 2,576 shop prices checked against the pricing engine, and all matched. Five blockers found in the evening, fixed by half past midnight.
14. 6 to 7 Oct

    The review, then two doors

    Nic and the team through the three studios with me; the next morning, my fifteen decisions: two doors, print folded into framing, one question per screen.
15. 16 Oct

    The gate

    Until launch, every signed-out page on the new platform led to an opening-soon page.
16. 26 Oct

    Rehearsal

    The switch rehearsed on staging, and the production pre-flight passed all 17 checks. Three of the mirror studio’s steps are renamed for launch.
17. 27 Oct

    Launched

    The new site went live at 00:32, and nothing was rolled back. The old program runs beside it for two weeks, finishing only the jobs already in it.

References

• Hermann, M., Pentek, T. and Otto, B. (2016). Design Principles for Industrie 4.0 Scenarios. 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
• Schuh, G., Anderl, R., Gausemeier, J., ten Hompel, M. and Wahlster, W. (eds) (2017). Industrie 4.0 Maturity Index: Managing the Digital Transformation of Companies. acatech Study.
• Bitner, M. J., Ostrom, A. L. and Morgan, F. N. (2008). Service Blueprinting: A Practical Technique for Service Innovation. California Management Review, 50(3).
• Mills, P. K. and Morris, J. H. (1986). Clients as “Partial” Employees of Service Organizations: Role Development in Client Participation. Academy of Management Review, 11(4).
• Star, S. L. and Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects. Social Studies of Science, 19(3).