Portfolio / Brand and institutional site
A contract between states has no market price.
When two governments contract directly there is no tender to discipline the price. There is a formula, a differential, and an official who will have to explain both to the auditor and to parliament. G2G Deal Design is powerabode DMCC's practice for designing that commercial architecture on the buying side. The brief was to turn a very high-trust offer — sovereign procurement, PPPs, defence, critical minerals — into a site that lands in the first viewport and still holds an expert on the tenth; to build it without a framework so it would run on shared hosting with PHP and Apache; and to hold every technical decision to the same promise the practice sells: that anything asserted can be traced back.
01The brief
Explaining a service you buy once.
Nobody arrives at this site to compare vendors. The reader is a ministry, a state enterprise or a public procurement team about to sign something with twenty-five-year consequences, and the first thing they need to establish is whose side the writer is on. A conventional agency site — benefits, logos, client wall — does not merely fail here. It subtracts.
The brief pulled in two directions at once. The first viewport has to be legible to someone who has never heard the phrase “resource-for-infrastructure”, and the rest of the page has to hold a negotiator who knows exactly what a crude-indexed slope is. The answer was structural: a homepage that layers the argument — where it applies, what is delivered, how it is negotiated, who signs — and dedicated routes for readers who already know what they came for.
The second requirement was framing. G2G Deal Design is not a standalone company. It is a practice inside powerabode DMCC, working to the group's own brand standard. The site had to read as an institution without dressing up as a bank, and to keep clear at all times what is the practice, what is the parent, and what each of them is to the reader.
What it had to solve
- 01Make a service with no public price legible
- 02Hold the neutral position in every sentence
- 03Add depth without losing the newcomer
- 04Separate the practice from its parent company
- 05Publish with no client figures and no testimonials
- 06Take confidential enquiries with no database
- 07Run on PHP and Apache on shared hosting
- 08Stay legible to search engines and to models
Our role
Content strategy, brand system and brand book, information architecture, design and development of the full site, the article system, the enquiry endpoint and its abuse controls, consent-gated analytics, structured data, and the automated release onto Apache.
02Where it applies
Three arenas. One discipline.
States contract state-to-state for precisely the things open bidding cannot secure for them. The stakes change; the method does not. The homepage is organised around those three arenas because it answers the first question a visitor asks: does this apply to what I am buying?
Fuels, LNG and the transition.
Crude, coal and LNG for the grid and the forces, and increasingly the materials of the energy transition: lithium, copper, cobalt. Often structured as resource-backed arrangements, where infrastructure or finance is exchanged for access to supply.
And now the infrastructure of intelligence.
Roads, ports, grids — and AI datacenters. These deals arrive as complex structures, debt or equity with sanctions and security woven through, and with strings attached in construction and in operation. Design decides whether those strings serve the state or bind it.
The oldest G2G channel of all.
Equipment, training and logistical support contracted government-to-government — the Foreign Military Sales model, which the site puts at US$117.9 billion of state-to-state sales in one recent year. Chosen for security of supply, and in need of the same benchmarked pricing and audit-ready governance.
03The rule
What decided every paragraph.
An unsourced number is not evidence.
The practice sells one concrete thing: that the price of a contract awarded without competition can be reconstructed from a public index and defended in front of an auditor. A site that sold that in superlatives would refute itself on the way past. So the writing rule became the rule of the service — every claim with its reference, every figure with its origin, and no sentence that cannot survive somebody asking where it came from.
That decided things that look like style and are not. Articles carry a visible references section. The experience logo cloud sits above a note stating outright that these are not clients. The homepage has no testimonials and no counters. And where there was no verified number, nothing was published. It is slower to write, and it is the only version that survives a room where everyone is a lawyer.
AssertReferenceAudit
04Identity
A mark that has to survive a stamp.
The symbol before the name
“G2G” is the shorthand the sector already uses, and the square turns it into a mark: two white Gs on navy with the teal 2 crossing them at the centre. It works without the wordmark because half the places it lives — favicon, avatar, the signature stamp on a PDF — have no room for anything else.
The tail belongs to the group
“DRIVEN BY ENERGY”, letterspaced in teal, is not this practice's tagline. It is powerabode's signature, which is why the group standard forbids retyping it as body text or shrinking it below its minimum. Where it does not fit, it is omitted rather than reduced.
The minimum, written down
The brand book sets clear space at the height of the symbol's “G” around the whole perimeter, and two minimums: 120 px or 25 mm wide for the full lockup, 32 px or 8 mm for the symbol alone. A stamp nobody can measure is a stamp that ends up misused.
The grounds it lives on
Use the symbol alone where space decides
Favicon, avatar and document stamp take the isolated symbol. Its job there is to signal, not to name, and the wordmark at that size only adds noise.
Switch to the light-ground version on colour
The symbol is a navy square: on navy or on teal it disappears. On any saturated ground it becomes the light tile with the letters in navy.
Stretch, rotate or add effects
The brand book's four prohibitions are the usual four because they are the four that actually happen: stretching the lockup to fill a box, rotating it, adding a shadow, recolouring it.
Place it on a low-contrast ground
The letterspaced tail is the finest part of the drawing and the first thing to vanish. Over a photo or a texture, use the symbol — or the lockup inside a flat panel.
05Visual system
Ministry navy, audit teal.
Headings, dark bands and the symbol's square
- HEX
- #1B3764
- RGB
- 27 · 55 · 100
Section labels, links and written accents
- HEX
- #217C74
- RGB
- 33 · 124 · 116
The 2 in the symbol and the brand book's drawn elements
- HEX
- #46B5AA
- RGB
- 70 · 181 · 170
- CMYK
- 61 · 0 · 6 · 29
Body copy and navigation at rest
- HEX
- #4B5C72
- RGB
- 75 · 92 · 114
Alternating bands and cards
- HEX
- #F5F8FB
- RGB
- 245 · 248 · 251
Dividers, field borders and hairlines
- HEX
- #E3EAF2
- RGB
- 227 · 234 · 242
The visible focus ring, and nothing else
- HEX
- #F2C14E
- RGB
- 242 · 193 · 78
06Typography
Geometric for the headline, neutral for the reading.
Space Grotesk
Deal architecture
500 Medium · 700 Bold
Inter
A G2G price is never a fixed figure: it is a formula.
400 · 500 · 600 · 700
Comfortaa
powerabode
400 · 500
Deal architecture
32 / 38 pt · Bold, 1.2× leadingGovernance without competition
20 / 26 ptPrice, risk and delivery
14 / 18 ptA G2G price is never a flat number. It is a formula.
11 / 17 pt · 1.5–1.6× leadingCOLOUR PALETTE
Uppercase in teal · +0.02–0.03 em trackingpowerabode
Comfortaa in lowercase, one size up from its surroundings07Voice and tone
It never sells. It argues.
Authoritative
It asserts with evidence, never with adjectives. Every sentence has to survive an auditor's scrutiny, because an auditor is going to read it.
Neutral
It takes no commercial side. The language mirrors the independence the service offers: the moment the copy starts to sound like a seller, the service stops being credible.
Direct
Short sentences, active verbs. No paragraph hides a figure or a condition at the end of a subordinate clause.
Do
Every price is referenced to a public index and can be traced by the auditor.
Don't
We offer the best energy solutions on the market!
Do
Names shown identify individual team members' prior professional environments.
Don't
Our clients include the world's largest oil companies.
Do
A G2G price is never a flat number: it is a formula, a differential, a slope.
Don't
We always secure the best possible price for our clients.
08The document
Fourteen spreads, one rule on each.
The brand book is where the identity is pinned down: manifesto, logo system, clear space, colour, typography, imagery, voice, and the applications — card, letterhead and email signature. It is here in full, served exactly as delivered: open any spread to read it at full size.
09Architecture
Four doors into one argument.
The first version was a single page. Today the site serves twenty canonical URLs behind four doors, because the four readers who arrive do not arrive for the same thing: the one researching PPPs, the one hunting a specific answer, the one checking who signs, and the one who has already decided to write.
A mega menu grouped by intent.
Three groups — shape the mandate, navigate the evidence, know the practice — in an accessible menu built on `details`, with `aria-expanded` state, Escape dismissal and focus return. On mobile the same content folds into a drawer with scroll locking.
A pillar carrying its own cluster.
Models, state commitments, risk allocation, renegotiation, and an announcement centre with programmes and financial closes linked to their sources. It is the route that concentrates the most intent traffic and links inward to the most articles.
Fourteen questions with long answers.
A chronological index with topic filters, and one template per article: short answer box, what you will learn, anchored sections, numbered takeaways, visible references, and an FAQ that matches the one in the JSON-LD.
10The site
The pages, exactly as the domain serves them.
Light with a Bold tail: the heading pattern of the powerabode group standard, which is also why the site sets in Open Sans rather than the brand book’s Space Grotesk. Two actions and no more: write to us, or understand how this works.
The panel groups by what the visitor wants to do, not by how the company is organised. The navy card on the left is the promise; the three columns are the routes.
Critical minerals and energy, infrastructure and development, defence and security. This is the section that answers “does this apply to me?” before anyone has scrolled a third of the page.
The core argument of the service, drawn: a tender only ever disciplines the rates — 15 % — and the other 85 % sits in specification and efficiency. It is a CSS graphic that assembles on entry; the data travels in the HTML, not in an image.
A sovereign negotiation is not two people. It is ministries, state enterprises, regulators, auditors, parliament and lenders. The diagram puts both states' actors in orbit around the contract.
Direct term supply, resource-for-infrastructure, transit and storage frameworks, bilateral joint ventures. Each form with its own architecture, on the same grid.
The route with a life of its own: models, commitments, governance and renegotiation from the public buyer's position, with its own announcement centre.
Two logo lanes moving in counterflow, pausing on hover and on keyboard focus. Below them, the note that makes the section honest: these are team members' prior environments, not a client list and not an endorsement.
Image-led editorial discovery with topic filters and real chronology: every card carries its ISO date in the markup and the newest article keeps the featured treatment.
Every article opens with the short answer and with what the reader will learn. Anyone who only needed the fact has it in the first viewport; anyone who needs the reasoning reads six sections further.
A table of contents generated from the article's own headings, sticky and scroll-spied as the reader descends. No library: it is the same pattern as the rest of the site.
PPP programmes, tenders and financial closes with their source linked and a short buy-side observation. The section opens by saying what it is and what it is not.
ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001, published as a visible block and as `Certification` entities linked to the organisation in the JSON-LD. What people read and what machines read are the same thing.
Four fields and one sentence saying what the details are used for. Below it, the reCAPTCHA line: protection is declared where it happens, not in a policy nobody opens.
GA4 and Clarity do not load until somebody accepts, and declining does not change the site — the notice says so. The preference can be reopened from the footer at any time.
The same mega menu, folded: expandable groups, 44 px touch targets, scroll locking while it is open and focus returned on close.
The same hierarchy at 430 px wide, with the contact action pinned to the bottom — respecting the device safe area and stepping aside while the cookie notice or the menu is open. No horizontal overflow at any tested width.
The mark co-signed with powerabode: teal edge stripe, the group wordmark above, the services line on the reverse. This is where you find out whether a stamp survives 8 mm.
11The release
From a commit to Apache, hands off.
The site lives on shared hosting, which is precisely where a manual deploy breaks: somebody uploads one file too many, forgets the `.htaccess`, or ships the config with the secret still inside it. The pipeline was automated so none of those three depends on remembering.
GitHub Actions
Orchestrates validation and releaseValidator
Sitemap, JSON-LD, titles and canonicalsRelease archive
Only what is servedreCAPTCHA secret
Injected, never committedApache · Bluehost
public_html and .htaccessIndexNow
Notifying the search engines
- 01
Validate before building
Every indexable page must appear in the sitemap and every sitemap entry must point at an indexable page. JSON-LD, canonicals, hreflang, alt text and duplicate IDs are checked too. If any of it fails, there is no archive.
- 02
Build the archive
A script assembles the release with what is served and leaves out what is not: repository metadata, documentation, local tooling and source-only files. What goes up is exactly the `public_html` tree.
- 03
Inject the secret
The reCAPTCHA private key is written into the release config from the repository secrets. If it is missing, the deployment fails — which is far better than shipping a form that silently rejects every visitor.
- 04
Sync over SSH
The archive is extracted straight into Bluehost's `public_html`, with the production `.htaccess` inside it. There is no manual step between an approved commit and the served tree.
- 05
Let Apache route
HTTPS and canonical host, `www` to apex, directory-style URLs, a file-existence guard so the legal `.html` pages stop redirecting to directories that do not exist, a custom 404, directory listings closed, and the security and caching headers.
- 06
Notify IndexNow
The sitemap URLs are submitted to the discovery protocol after upload. The step is non-blocking: if the service is down, the site's deployment does not go down with it.
20 canonical URLs · 1 release archive · 0 manual steps between commit and Apache
12The enquiry
Five filters before a single email.
A public form on a sovereign advisory domain collects spam from day one, and the usual answer — a visible captcha — charges the toll to the wrong person. The endpoint is a single PHP file on the same site: no database, no session, no customer-data file. What it does is filter, then send two emails.
Origin, bait and clock.
Same-site `Origin` and `Referer` checks, a honeypot field that returns a fake success to whoever fills it, and a minimum of 1.5 seconds between the form being painted and the submission arriving. All three are invisible to a real writer.
reCAPTCHA v3, all three checks.
Passing the score is not enough: the declared action and the hostname the service returns are validated too, so a token lifted from another page in the world is worthless here. The public key travels in the HTML; the private one never leaves the repository secret.
Limits that store nobody.
Per-IP, per-recipient and site-wide rate limits with HMAC-derived keys: the counters exist, but no raw IP or email address is written to disk. And the visitor acknowledgement does not quote the message back, so the form cannot be used as a branded relay.
13Discovery
What the domain declares today.
Counted against what g2gdealdesign.com serves on 29 August 2026, not against the handover document: the sitemap is generated from the published page set, so it grows on its own. There is no traffic or ranking figure here — those depend on owner access that is not ours.
- 20
- Canonical URLs in the generated sitemap
- 14
- Published analyses in Insights
- 10
- Linked entities in the homepage JSON-LD
- 3
- ISO certifications declared as entities
14The stack
No dependency that is not served.
The architectural decision was to have no application. No framework build, no database, no session, no client-side secret: HTML, CSS and JavaScript served as they are, and a single server-side capability — the form's mail — which is all the shared host has to know how to do. A site that explains itself is also a site that outlives the team that built it.
HTML5 · CSS · JavaScript sin framework
Styles and scripts split by responsibility — base, navigation, footer, articles, animated icons and analytics — real cacheable images lazy-loaded below the fold, and a hand-written animated SVG icon system, with no framework runtime shipped to decorate a page.
PHP · Apache · Bluehost
One PHP file for the enquiry and an `.htaccess` for everything else: canonicals, redirects, 404, headers and closed directory listings. Publishing is orchestrated by GitHub Actions · IndexNow, which validates, packages, injects the secret, syncs and notifies.
GA4 · Microsoft Clarity · reCAPTCHA v3
Analytics does not load until there is explicit consent, advertising storage and Google Signals stay denied, the form is masked from Clarity, and reCAPTCHA is disclosed separately because it protects a form rather than measuring behaviour.
15The status
What is done, and what is not ours to do.
The site is live and answers on its apex: g2gdealdesign.com, checked on 29 August 2026. On that check the domain serves 20 canonical URLs with 8 image entries in the sitemap, a robots.txt that names search and AI crawlers explicitly, an llms.txt carrying the practice's context, and a JSON-LD graph in which the organisation, the parent, the people, the certifications and the FAQ are linked to one another.
The project changed shape more than once during delivery, and that is part of the case too: a flat header became an accessible mega menu; an article list became an editorial index with filters and real chronology; a rigid logo grid became an animated cloud with edge masking and a static output under reduced motion; and a self-hosted proof-of-work experiment was withdrawn before release in favour of reCAPTCHA v3, keeping the improvements that stood on their own — the minimum fill time, the rate limits, and the acknowledgement that does not echo the sender.
Things were also fixed that only appear against a real Apache: the legal `.html` pages redirected to directories that did not exist until a file-existence guard was added, the homepage had a duplicate at `/index.html`, and the hero logo overflowed on mobile. None of those three shows up on a development server.
Owner-side follow-ups
- 01Confirm data arrival in GA4 and Clarity
- 02Verify sender SPF, DKIM and DMARC
- 03Submit the sitemap from Search Console
- 04Request indexing in Bing Webmaster Tools
- 05Approve named authors and reviewers
- 06Decide whether to add an email subscription
What this case does not claim
There are no traffic, ranking, conversion or client figures here, and no testimonials. The discovery infrastructure was built and can be verified; whether a search engine indexes is an external outcome that depends on owner access. Publishing the second as if it were the first would be exactly the kind of claim this site exists to dismantle.
More of the work
When what you sell is neutrality, the website is the first piece of evidence.
Advisory, public sector, high-trust professional services: in these categories design does not decorate the argument, it carries it. An unsourced number, an unnamed testimonial or a leaky form costs more than any redesign.
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