Responses by Hello Design

Background: We designed our agency website to communicate Hello Design’s vision, mission and values, while highlighting our work and capabilities. While we are a creative agency that’s driven to craft worthy experiences, we are essentially a strategic partner first, and we help brands innovate products and services beyond marketing and creative work.

Highlights: The site is designed for simplicity—with easy to find content and easy to use across devices—which allowed us to focus on editorial storytelling using videos, animations and image galleries that create a dynamic interactive experience. Each case study has dynamic sidebars that appear as users scroll through the content, showing up in relevant places as supplements.

Challenges: The hardest part was the editing process. We had to sort through years of work for clients across industries, which meant going into terabytes of data and assets in the archives. It was definitely a team effort.

Navigational structure: We wanted the navigation to be simple and accessible. It’s always there at the top of the page, but as users scroll down, it disappears so users can be immersed in the content. Any time users scroll back up, the navigation reappears immediately. We like the idea of making the interface transparent so that people can focus on the content, yet still functional at the right moment.

Time constraints: It’s a real challenge to find time for your own work because client work always comes first. We really had to put down a firm deadline for ourselves—this forced us to make design decisions and work with a defined system. To us, the site is a live entity, which will continue to evolve as we add content.

Technical features: To create an editorial experience, we designed the website to be very modular and flexible, with components that can be easily added and moved around the page. We also customized the CMS to give our website editorial control over the layouts.