Award-winning consultancy Curzon Consulting approached Hamilton-Brown to reimagine their brand identity, look and feel and online presence. As Digital Lead my job was to work with our branding team to produce a new identity, online presence and guidelines that were versatile enough to be rolled out across all touch points.
The architecture
I ran an initial UX workshop that was part affinity mapping, part card sorting to identify what their current site wasn't achieving and subsequently what the new site would need to contain in order to reposition their brand as market leaders. After lengthy discussion and a lot of post-it notes we were able to narrow it down to some key areas. I the pulled this into a Miro board to give us an outline of how the information architecture would start to form.
Test, test, and test
Once we had an agreed information architecture I was able to wireframe the site in Balsamiq and put together a clickable lo-res prototype that the client could play around with. We also tested the prototype extensively in-house to gather feedback, we deliberately chose a group of testers that had varying levels of tech savvy in order to get a balanced overview. We were able to quickly test, iterate and refine the prototype until we had something that could be used to put together a visual design and from there an inventory of core visual and functional elements.
Iterate and refine
Using the wireframe prototype as a starting point I was able to mockup the user interface for core pillar pages of the site for desktop and mobile to create hi-res prototypes that could be tested and iterated to refine the experience.
Overlap and intersect
From the UI designs I was then able to put together a library of modular components that the client can use to build out pages and sections on the site. These components can overlap and intersect to create a content flow on the page that breaks up the content into digestible chunks.
A confident new presence
Working closely with the brand design team we assigned colours from the palette and graphic elements to represent key areas within Curzon's offering. This allowed me to produce a bold new website and online presence that made confident use of the new brand and visual identity.
"Simon's creative and technical skills resulted in a vastly improved digital experience for users. He took the time to understand our requirements and found creative solutions to meet them. His user-centric approach to front-end web design has helped Curzon to create a strong brand identity and increase visitor engagement. I learnt a lot from Simon about UX, web design and typography. It was a joy to work with Simon and I recommend him to any organisation looking to improve their digital presence."
Lois Taylor - Head of Marketing