Responses by Jay Hollywood, principal and creative director, Humaan.

Background: The new website is the result of a journey we started in 2018, rethinking our brand and how we portray ourselves as a company. We started with a team-wide brand workshop that evolved into an all-new identity, something that better fit our values and culture. Over the past year, we’ve been conceptualizing and evolving ideas for the website, aiming for something a bit more mature and restrained, while also promoting our experience and capabilities. We’re proud of how the website now accurately reflects us as a company and speaks to new clients—the two key objectives of the process.

Design core: The site strikes a balance between simplicity and bold visuals, which we’ve instilled throughout. From the showreel reveal on the homepage to the unexpected nature of the Team page—and small delights encountered through scrolling—we believe the core feature is the unique experience that’s discovered by navigating through the site.

Favorite details: While there are a number of interesting visual elements, we’re most proud of the subtle details that often go unnoticed. These include the cursor changes when navigating carousels throughout the site, the animated text change when you hover over our logo, simple color transitions, and the use of our “Interface” identity system throughout the site to bring the new brand to life.

Challenges: Creating a website for yourself is always challenging, given the high expectations and limited capacity between client engagements. This being website number five, we knew we were in for a long journey—but still, we underestimated the effort involved with content. The new website launched with more than 50 case studies of our work, which were all written or rewritten for the new website, plus uniquely designed within the modular case study framework we developed for the site. Separately, we decided to produce the Showreel in-house, which required a whole different skillset and process. Finally, the overall brand story and website copy were rewritten several times to find the right tone, even up to launch day.

Divergent paths: We prototyped much of the key experience of the website through the design process, but it didn’t prevent us evolving and changing much of the design while the website was coming to life in the development and review stages, particularly as content was added. If we had the chance to start over, we’d take some of our own advice that we give to clients: Start with content up-front as it will streamline the process and ensure the best possible result from the outset.