Gravitywell: The Next Generation
It was time
Our last website redesign was back in 2014. It coincided with a complete rebrand and has since successfully elevated the agency. But Gravitywell has evolved..
5 Years on we’ve grown and we’re a lot more confident as an agency. We thrive on a challenging brief, love to push ourselves and our clients and we’re very proud of the work we produce. The team is a well balanced group of gifted individuals and we have a collaborative nurturing studio environment.
We’re not just a tech agency, we’re not a design agency, we also do film, photography, branding, strategy, startups, marketing and more. We've discovered that our strength lies in taking existing businesses through a major digital transformation, rather than just solving a single problem.
We needed the new website to communicate all this.
Concepts that came out of the initial discussions were:
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Clear
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Confident
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Engaging
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Down-to-earth
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Skilled
Perfect. Having been at Gravitywell for 5 years I felt that along with the above themes I had a pretty good understanding of how we have evolved, so I got cracking with wireframes and swiftly on to designs. I soon realised that the site would be full to the brim with content, and I didn’t want the designs to distract from that.
Video
We want people to understand who we are, what we do and why we do it as quickly as possible - so what was our one liner going to be?
“We deliver amazing digital experiences”
“We are a creative team who build amazing websites and apps”
“Passionate people dedicated to discovering, developing and delivering”
“We help global brands design, build and launch digital products”
“We discover, design and build effective digital experiences”
“We’re passionate about crafting digital experiences that make an impact”
“We work with brands to design and engineer digital products”
“We create sites and apps users love”
...
“We are passionate bla bla, creating amazing something something”
Eesh - no. These are all taglines I found on other digital agency websites. We’re not all about “Standing out from the crowd” but we certainly don’t want to appear generic and write a one liner suited for a wordpress template.
We decided that the best way to deliver our message is to dissect it a little.
When you land on the homepage, the design uses different elements to communicate who we are and what we do. An essential addition to our new site is video. It’s incredibly engaging and gives a great overview of what we’re about. That combined with a simple one liner, which isn’t trying to say too much, and some intuitive work related tags help to complete the full picture.
In fact the new site has a few videos sprinkled around. It’s a medium we are working with more and more for clients so it makes sense to utilise it’s potential on our own site too.
Moving image has an instant impact and the user can quickly become engaged and pick up on direct messages, atmospheres, subtle cues, relationships and tones visually. Our brain loves video; we are significantly more likely to remember a message when we watch it, rather than read it. By having non-obtrusive background videos in our page headers users can get a strong understanding of our studio atmosphere, the type of work we do and the kind of relationships we form with clients. All that without having to read a single word.
Our work
The project pages on the old site were starting to look a little tired and dated. The main focus of this area was big image-led case studies to really show off our work. Loud and proud. But if you like a good read, we haven’t neglected your needs. Case studies are a great way to gain insight into our working processes, we approach all projects according to their individual requirements meaning no two case studies the same, so you should definitely head over to Projects for a binge read.
Our working process is very important, though - Something we’re proud of, and something our clients admire. But we don’t necessarily want to bog you down with a whole “Our process” page (partly because there is no set template to our process) so we’ve just dropped in some bite size snippets around the website.
Oh, here’s one!
Thought leaders
At Gravitywell we have been lucky enough to acquire a strong team with a wide variety of skill-sets, like a digital superband, like a digital world XI, like digital Avengers, like … well I think you get the idea, I’ve bigged us up enough now.
The point is our roster has a lot of knowledge and insight to share and that’s where Insights comes in. We dedicate time to R&D, pick up new skills, discover new technologies in and outside of project work and this is the place we share it with the community. So add it to your bookmarks and check-in once in a while.
Of course the easier way to stay in the loop with us is to sign-up to our newsletter which has also had a revamp.
In summary
The redesign felt like quite a straight-forward process. It was a natural evolution to a confident, concise and eye-catching design. Nothing too fussy; a combination of bold typography, rich and engaging media, image-led case studies and insightful content. The key was not to over design the website itself, but to create a platform in which we can showcase the things we do whilst highlighting the team and their skills. This approach allows the content to take centre stage and gives a clear understanding of what it’s like to work with us.
And finally I'd like to finish with my favourite piece of feedback so far. Sat at home with my partner, I typed in the web address and turned the laptop round to show her, and she just said
Wow, that's been sexed up a bit hasn't it!
