About Crag Mesh Zone
Every project gets my attention at the strategy stage. That is where most digital work goes wrong.
Crag Mesh Zone started in 2018 as a one-person practice. Megan Brayshaw had spent four years at a mid-size agency in Manchester, producing work she was proud of but rarely seeing it through from brief to launch without a committee involved. She left in the spring of that year with two retained clients, a secondhand standing desk, and a fairly clear idea of what she did not want to repeat. The name came from a notebook sketch of a structural diagram, the kind of mesh grid used to map load-bearing points in architecture. It stuck.
The first two years were mostly referral work: small business sites, a couple of e-commerce builds, one nonprofit rebrand that took longer than quoted and taught her more than the previous four years combined. By 2020 the practice had grown enough to bring in a second developer on a project basis, and by 2022 the team had settled into a working shape it has more or less kept since. Three people, occasionally four on larger builds. The deliberate smallness is not a constraint. It is the point. Every project that comes through the door gets Megan's attention at the strategy stage, which is where most digital projects go wrong.
The work now sits mostly in the mid-market: businesses that have outgrown a template site but are not yet large enough to justify an in-house team. A lot of professional services, some consumer brands, a handful of cultural organisations. The common thread is clients who have been burned once by a cheap build and want to understand what they are paying for this time. That suits us. We like explaining our decisions. If you want to know more about how we approach a project, the story behind us is on this page, and you can see the current work on the portfolio page.
Megan Brayshaw studied graphic design at Leeds Arts University, graduating in 2010, then spent two years in a small print studio before moving into digital work. She joined a Manchester-based agency in 2014, where she led UX on a range of retail and professional-services accounts. In 2018 she left to found Crag Mesh Zone, initially as a solo practice. She has a particular interest in information architecture and the point at which visual design and content strategy overlap. Outside the studio she runs long distances on fell terrain, which she says has more in common with project planning than most people expect.