Responses by Will Miller, design director, Firebelly

Background: The firm serves Generation X/Y LGBTQ households, offering expert and lasting advice. We made a simple and sophisticated website to help Brian Thompson reach—and immediately reassure—potential clientele.

Highlights: Some highlights of the site include the custom monospaced font we created for the identity, the exposed columns and flexible grid that allows the imagery to have a unique and dynamic life and the photography that reveals itself in an open-and-close blind fashion.

Challenges: Creating a rich and varied path around the site’s content was our biggest hurdle. We also wanted to avoid a sense of staleness in our content and had to find interesting ways to make the site feel fresh at every turn.

Time constraints: We were trying to have the site live as soon as possible, so we went through the design and development process quickly. In many ways, the site was an outcome of many experiments and potential failures and the constant level of back and forth collaborations between design and development kept the ideas and executions on track.

Anything new: When we begin projects that have digital and physical components, it's important for us to feel the consistency between both environments. While we focused more on the unique business cards and letterheads for the print side, on the website, we focused more on the animations, reveals and other dynamic elements that could only be used on the website.