Client: IDEO (2015)
Designing IDEO.com as a more modern reflection of our company and brand
Role: Creative Director
In 2015 IDEO’s web presence was woefully out of date. The last refresh was in 2008.
In that time, web standards and user expectations had changed and IDEO as a business looked very different. As IDEO continues to evolve, we set out to redesign our flagship web property by first asking ourselves, how should IDEO.com reflect our business today and support our evolution in the coming years? The goldfish needed a bigger, better bowl.
IDEO’s marketing team made the decision to build a new site from scratch...and to do it all in-house. I led creative direction on the program. The project was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t easy. I’m fond of saying that IDEO has turned out to be the most difficult client I’ve worked with. Seven hundred designers across the globe—each with a particular view of what our message and look & feel should be—makes for a tangled process.
As we went through the process of untangling the challenge, four design principles guided our work. We would lead with questions. We would celebrate our people. We would pare down the number of case studies we feature for greater focus and clarity. We would make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for, no matter their device.
After a year of work discovering, designing, refining, coding and launching, here’s a bit of what emerged:
Visual Style
The new IDEO.com is bold and confident. Big typography drives our visual identity. A yellow highlight emphasizes our nerdiness and serves as a gesture to our analog process (Post-It notes). Project photos tend toward journalism and portraits are candid, not posed. This is IDEO, both humble and self-assured.
Navigation
IDEO.com serves diverse audiences with different needs. The site structure is meant to provide clear journeys for clients, fans, and job-seekers. Ultimately, every page will offer paths for direct engagement so that the contact page is not the sole avenue for interaction.
New ways to communicate what we do
IDEO’s offers are evolving every day. The site is designed to grow with us over time. Today, we have a strong focus on our core consulting offer, with clear paths to the new businesses we are building. Tomorrow, we can shift that balance if we feel it’s necessary.
Framing big challenges by leading with questions
With these thematic questions, we’ve captured some of the biggest ideas emerging across global IDEO. We bring them to life with vivid stories of how we’re tackling these challenges.
Showcasing our best work
Here’s our chance to amplify the work we’re most proud of, and the stories that help drive our business. We added new headings to help our readers understand what we’ve done — The Challenge, Design Outcome, and Impact.
Celebrating People
Project case studies were the primary currency of our old website. Now, we’re balancing that with a focus on our people—their ideas, skills, passions and aspirations. This will require a bit more from everyone, but will connect our designers more visibly to their work.
Inspiring through the blog
A peek inside the minds (and moleskines) of our community to shine a light on how they view the world. Think of this is our collective blog/magazine/gallery space/sandbox, a place to brandish our craft and to get better at crafting a point of view.
After launch, feedback from the broader design community was positive. The Design Rush review comments,
“IDEO’s website is like the sassy aunt that tells you to get to the point. This site seems to have reinvented the phrase ‘less is more’...IDEO’s minimalist approach is stunning and forces the viewer to get to the meat of their page. It’s an idyllic masterpiece that sways the viewer to look at web design for what it is, a digital sense of style...IDEO’s web design is funky and innovative without loud colors, overbearing illustrations or subpage disorganization. It’s useful, captivating, and basic. They’re a global design company because they choose to be innovative by using a basic user interface.”