Corporate Direct
10 Mistakes to Avoid When Setting Up an LLC
Corporate Direct is a US-based firm with over 35 years of experience in asset protection, business formation, and corporate compliance. The company helps entrepreneurs, real estate investors, and digital asset holders build legal structures that shield their personal wealth from liability, with a strong emphasis on privacy and professional trust.
The brief was a guide built around ten common mistakes people make when setting up an LLC — content that’s genuinely useful but, in its raw form, reads like a list of legal warnings. The challenge was balancing Corporate Direct’s professional, trustworthy tone with a format a first-time entrepreneur would actually want to read cover to cover, not just skim once and set aside.
I designed the full guide — layout system, typography, and custom informational graphics — for the ten-mistake structure the client’s content team had already outlined.
Each mistake gets its own section break, so the guide reads as ten short, self-contained lessons rather than one long document. Custom graphics carry weight the text can’t — a state-by-state US map for the “forming in the wrong state” mistake, and clear side-by-side comparisons distinguishing correct from incorrect practice elsewhere in the guide. The color palette and photography stay close to Corporate Direct’s existing brand, so the guide feels like an extension of the company rather than a stand-alone document, while the layout itself — generous whitespace, a clear typographic hierarchy — keeps dense legal content from feeling like dense legal content.
01Working from finished material — the client provided a complete, already-written text, along with rough, hand-drawn sketches of the tables and diagrams they wanted included.
02Translating the sketches — my job was to take those rough drawings and turn them into a polished, presentable visual form, rather than to originate the content or structure myself.
03Sourcing the imagery — selected all the photography used throughout the guide.
04Iterating mostly on text — because the structure and visuals were largely settled early on, most of the revision rounds were about refining text and copy rather than redesigning layouts.
