On October 12, Moises Jaramillo at OpaqAI looked at the first wireframes for their new site and flagged one graphic. The architecture diagram put OpaqAI’s governance layer in the middle, with every other box arranged around it. “Per the message, our customers are free to choose models, harnesses and orchestration platforms,” he wrote. “At first sight, being in the middle of everything, this wasn’t obvious.”
He was right, and it was my diagram. The copy said the right thing and the picture argued with it. In a technical diagram, the center reads as “everything runs through us.” OpaqAI’s position is close to the reverse. It governs what AI agents are allowed to do, and it shows up at the moment an agent acts on a system, without asking the customer to rebuild their stack around it. Where your product sits in a diagram is a claim about your business, and it lands faster than the sentence printed next to it.
Why the middle is the default
Most product diagrams start with the product, because the team drawing them starts there. The logo goes in the center, everything connects to it, and the picture looks finished. It also says your product is the hub. For some companies that’s true and worth saying loudly. For a company whose pitch is “keep what you already have,” the middle quietly makes the other side’s case.
What changed
I suggested redrawing it so the customer’s stack reads as their own choice, any model, harness or orchestration platform, with OpaqAI placed where it does its job: checking an agent’s identity and authority when it acts, and recording what happened. Before drawing anything, I asked the team whether that was the right picture of where the product sits, because they know the architecture better than I do. They sent back a sketch of how they saw it, and the redrawn diagram went out with the second round of wireframes on October 13.
The rest of the project moved around that decision. Copy arrived on October 9 and the four-page design was signed off on October 16. OpaqAI’s own team built the site from the Figma file, and it’s live at opaq.ai. The full project is in the OpaqAI case study.
Check yours
Open the main diagram on your site or in your deck and cover the labels. Ask what the layout alone says: what’s in the middle, what’s at the edges, what depends on what. Then compare that with the sentence you’d use to describe your product to a buyer. If the picture and the sentence disagree, fix the picture before you write more copy around it.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on yours, you can grab a short intro call.
Daniel G. Bright
Founder, BrightStudios
