Responses by Graeme McGowan, creative partner, Jamhot.

Background: This new site helps North Uist Distillery Co. take the next step forward in its evolution, following its move to a new distillery building—well, new for them but very old as it was built in the 1700s! As the team gets ready to start distillation of the first-ever whiskey to be legally produced on their beautiful island home in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, we wanted to bring our core brand concept of “island life distilled” to life in a succinct, upbeat and friendly way.

Design core: We started from scratch, creating a whole new suite of copy and content for the site that would better tell the distillery’s story. This included creating illustrations, hero videos for the banners and island photography. Our mantra for the project was to keep the design simple and clean and the copy short and sweet. We hope that we’ve managed to achieve that in the execution.

Favorite details: We took a lot of care crafting each site element and think its success is based on the balance of the elements working together. We’re proud of the copy and how we were able to capture the distillery story, developing a strong voice for the business rooted in the island.

Time constraints: Our client was amazing in that they gave us the time and space to play with design and content and the freedom to iterate, ensuring we never had to settle and could tweak the copy and refine the design and content to ensure that the final output was deserving of such a great group of people.

New lessons: Not so much something new, but a good reminder of something that I think we already knew. Often, less is more, and it’s important to have the space to explore ideas and time to make iterations on design, copy and content.

Technology: We built the site using Shopify as the back-end CMS and e-commerce technology. Having used this platform in the past, we were always impressed with the commerce functionality, and the support was always excellent.