Responses by Johanna Drewe, creative director and partner; and Bahar Shahidi, senior strategist, Output.

Background: Found is a creative studio with 3-D motion design as its medium. As the studio has matured, its work has shifted to be more design led and focused on specialist craft, while its clients have evolved from the ad world to the branding world.

We were challenged to communicate this change through a new brand identity and website and express what makes Found different: the people, craft and approach. The aim is to encourage enquiries from the right prospective clients, and for Found to be seen by potential recruits as an inspiring, rewarding place to work.

Design core: Reflecting Found’s level of refinement on the previous site made the studio look good but aloof. That was at odds with how friendly and approachable we knew the team to be. We wanted to close that gap so anyone interacting with Found’s brand would get a sense of what it’s like to work there—delivering awe-inspiring outputs with warmth.

While the design framework of the site is pared back and monochromatic, the crafted typography introduces a more conversational tone. There’s a sense of many voices contributing. The logo itself continues this theme, looking like a masthead for a magazine. And the visual content itself features subtle touches that bring it to life, such as video loops animating on mouse rollover.

Challenges: Like many of us over the last year, Found has been increasingly persuaded by the ease and value of cloud-based working. Moving its workflow to Google Workspace meant thinking differently about its visual identity and website requirements. We created a Google-first design system, working within the limitations of the typeface, styling and layout choice to get Found’s brand looking as beautiful in Google Slides as on its website. Imposing this kind of restriction while communicating craft and distinction proved to be an unusual design challenge.

Navigation structure: The main idea was to keep the navigation simple. When designing a website for a motion studio, the first thought is to get visitors quickly into the work. So Work doubles as the homepage, offering bite-sized information on clients and awards.

To communicate the craft, care and imagination of Found’s artists and storytellers, we added the Studio page. This is the team’s journal, a space to talk about their process, creative explorations and experiments. In Found’s competitive space, the work is often left to speak for itself. Sharing the human voices behind the work stands out, and this conversational approach carries over into the News and Contact pages.

Special features: The site is built in WordPress by our long-term collaborator Jens Meijer, so it’s easy for the team to update content through the CMS but with some additional coded features to add a layer of detail. In Studio, you can switch focus between the images uploaded to a post, with secondary images layering and dropping into black and white. The different serif and sans-serif typography styles in headlines can be selected by simply choosing regular, bold and italic. Like the site itself, it looks beautiful, but it’s really practical.