Project Background
Habitat Architects is an architecture firm in Sydney, Australia run and owned by Thomas Cox. Thomas wants to continue working with great people to work with. We were engaged to help Thomas develop a website which would attract great clients and show off some of his life's work.
Goals
- To create a website which displayed Thomas’s work in its different forms
- Ease the initial client engagement
- Target specific types of work
- Develop the Habitat Architects brand.
Process and my involvement
Kickoff workshop - Understand Who and what Habitat Architects is and does. Understand their goals and the problems they encounter trying to achieve those goals.
Branding Workshop - In order to develop Habitat Architects brand we used a card deck with different words that can describe one's personality. In this way we whittle down Habitat Architects brand personality into a few words, in this case down to 5, with 3 different aspects. These were the following : Habitat Architects is 'Welcoming, Wise, Trusted', their process is 'Rigorous', their outcome is 'Timeless'.
Brand Development - Primarily lead by Tim (initial work) and Emi (final brand) of Velvet Onion, my role was to assist and help brainstorm early directions for the brand. Using the 5 personalities we explored different logos, wordmarks and typefaces. We started with different typefaces, exploring different Serif and San-Serif typefaces, keeping the HA brand personality in mind. 5 different options were discussed internally before presenting Thomas with 3 to choose from. Several developments later we settled on a wordmark and copy fonts. Later in the project colours were finalised as well.
Information Architecture (IA) and Content Brief - In order to target Habitat Architects preferred clients, I first looked to other architecture firms in Sydney, to see firstly how they displayed their work, what categories, terms, etc. they used and secondly what work they display; drawing plans, renderings, building progress, or finished work. Using this as a starting point, I developed an IA and then talked this through with Thomas for feedback. A few versions through Thomas was happy to proceed. Following I developed a content brief following the IA, detailing how the content should flow into other content, what it should talk about, etc. in order to capture our target audience.
Rough Whiteboard sketches - to start the design I worked on whiteboards, roughing out the design, developing and updating it as feedback came in from the team and Thomas. Once the base layout was understood and ok’d I moved on straight to Squarespace to save project time and to help Thomas understand how and where the content will be used, to ease the content creation process.
Squarespace Build - The layout build went smoothly and quickly was ready for content. As I mentioned earlier, this project was part of a prize, what this meant, Thomas was not aware of how much time he would need to put in to create the content required, needing to work outside his usual architectural work hours. Fortunately this was no issue, as Thomas had existing work and, the content when ready, was able to be dropped straight into the build.
Visual Design - With the branding finalised, it was time to apply the branding to the Squarespace site, utilizing a dark blue, warm yellow and white colour scheme, the site and the Habitat Architects brand was brought to life.
Brand and Website Handover - Before finishing for the year we delivered Habitat Architects a branding deck and the Squarespace site, with an accompanying help guide. Due to Thomas’s time constraints, not all the content was ready for the site at the end of our formal engagement and so the help guide details a step by step guide to update, copy, images, hyperlinks and create new pages.
The site is still being updated by Thomas, see it by clicking the button below