Responses by Lee Salisbury and Harrison Croft, creative directors, UnitOneNine

Background: Hedge House Furniture is a family owned company that designs and builds handmade modern hardwood furniture using sustainable resources. The redesign of the site was part of an overall effort to build awareness for the brand, tell the family story and directly engage with users.

Highlights: The photography. Luckily the owner and lead designer at Hedge House is also an accomplished photographer. It was a pleasure to have such great assets to work with. Having strong photography for the site allowed for a cleaner approach to the user experience, art direction and typography.

Challenges: Integrating the new site with the previous iteration, while maintaining data integrity.

Technical features: We’re showing specific wood details on both the homepage as well as material pages to further involve users in the selection process. The site is run on Wordpress as a CMS and it was customized to meet the exacting front-end design needs as well as tailored towards workflow for the client.

Navigational structure: We used a dark background to contrast with the rest of the site and to help separate what was Primary navigation. This gives users a visual way to engage with content that is meaningful for them at any point throughout the site. Then, we added the shop section of the navigation to allow users to quickly browse through products from anywhere on the site.