Responses by Jamie Judges, digital director, Seesaw Studio.

Background: HBA had just gone through a major brand transformation, bringing a number of specialist businesses together under a single global proposition called One HBA. The website was a big part of making that change real, creating a digital experience that felt like one connected global business rather than a collection of individual studios.

The primary audience was prospective clients across luxury hospitality, residential and lifestyle sectors. At the same time, HBA wanted the site to help attract talent by giving people a genuine sense of the culture, creativity and people behind the brand.

For me, the challenge was finding the balance between consistency and individuality. HBA has studios all over the world, each with its own personality and market focus, so the site needed to feel globally connected while still reflecting that diversity. The goal was to create something that showcased the scale of the practice without losing the human side of the business.

Design core: One of the most interesting challenges was helping people navigate almost 60 years of work. HBA has an incredible portfolio, but we knew visitors didn’t want to trawl through hundreds of projects to find something relevant. We used IP-based regionalization to tailor the homepage experience, surfacing projects that were most relevant to where someone was visiting from. It sounds simple, but it made the experience feel much more personalized and useful from the outset.

Another feature I really love is the HBA timeline. A lot of people know the brand, but not everyone realizes HBA stands for Howard Hirsch Bedner Associates, the original founders. We worked with the team to build an interactive timeline using archival photography and key milestones from across the business's history. It’s a great way of telling the HBA story, and it gives people a glimpse into how both the company and the design industry have evolved over the decades.

Challenges: Without question, the biggest challenge was designing for a genuinely global business. HBA has 29 studios across fourteen countries, and every region has different priorities, content needs and ways of working.

Early on, we spent a lot of time talking with teams across the network to understand what was important to them and how they used the website to support business development. Those conversations were invaluable because they helped us build a structure that worked globally without feeling rigid.

From a user perspective, we also had to make a huge amount of content feel easy to navigate. Projects, people, news, awards and studios all needed to connect in meaningful ways. A lot of the challenge was actually happening behind the scenes, creating a content and publishing framework that gave individual studios flexibility while still maintaining a consistent experience for visitors. Getting that balance right was probably the hardest part of the project.

Time constraints: What it really led to was a much smarter content model. With so many studios contributing content, we didn’t want people updating the same information in multiple places. So, we built the site so that everything is connected behind the scenes. When something new is added, it automatically appears in the right places across the site.

That made the experience richer for visitors, but it also made life much easier for the content teams managing the platform globally. We also built in multilingual support, including Chinese, and made sure the site remembered language preferences so the experience felt seamless.

Navigation structure: We wanted the website to feel simple. HBA has an enormous amount of content, and visitors shouldn’t have to work hard to find it. We organized everything into five core sections and focused on making content easy to discover.

One of the more interesting decisions was having projects open in an overlay rather than taking people to a new page. When you finish a project, you’re dropped back exactly where you left off, just by scrolling. It’s a small thing, but it creates a much more fluid browsing experience and encourages people to keep exploring rather than constantly navigating backwards and forwards.

Favorite details: Honestly, I’m most proud that we managed to maintain such a wonderful relationship with the client, while keeping the original vision intact despite the scale of the project. There were teams working all over the world, hundreds of projects to document and a huge amount of content to bring together. It could easily have become fragmented.

Instead, the final site feels cohesive. There’s a huge amount of depth there, but it still feels visual, immersive and easy to navigate. That’s really a reflection of how collaborative the process was between HBA, Seesaw and our production partners. Everyone stayed focused on creating the best possible experience, and I think that shows in the end result.