→ overview
As part of my internship at Farewell Architects LLC., I was tasked with redesigning the company's outreach materials.
This included but was not limited to a website, paper business materials, and board layouts for presenting existing projects.
→ problem definition
After visiting the website myself, I sat down with firm members to understand pain points and develop a scope for the project.
While Farewell Architecture's site was beautiful to look at, it lacked clear navigation, visual hierarchy, and accessible layouts.
The initial website was "project-forward", with the only layout navigation being clicking on a tile-mosaic of different past projects to discover these buildings as users scrolled through the site.
Old user interface suffered from lack of clarity along with projects only being identifiable via silhouette.
While this was helpful for new clients jumping from work to work, it was ineffective as an index of projects, as it was impossible to identify a specific project from the unlabeled grid of the previous interface. Additionally, new assets and drawings for more recent projects had not been fully documented and uploaded similar to older projects, so reused photos and tiles only made the site more confusing.
I aimed for a "firm-forward" impression in the website redesign, emphasizing company values such as environmental sustainability clear in an effort to align with clients.
→ design evolution
I built upon the current layout to create a balance between art gallery and research catalog, ensuring an intuitive experience for all guests.
The target users for this website could have 1 of 2 approaches: either surveying multiple different projects or looking for a specific project that aligms with their goal.
Creating clarity for casual scrollers
The tile-mosaic navigation was cleaned up as a "general projects" page, with titles and updated assets such as thumbnails.
Emphasizing navigation between projects
Project subpages organized buildings by purpose (residential, institutional, etc.) for those with specific ideas in mind
This layout indexed projectsalong with scattered thumbnails that would direct them to the corresponding project.
I pushed the firm's accomplishments and current values, creating a clear brand identity for first-time clients.
Homepage banner and community impact!
I'm also currently designing a search feature and other filtering, such as by location, of projects for the larger project collection.
Check out the website in progress here!
