Designing Differently: A New Website for Lawrence Group
Date Posted: February 14, 2020
Posted In: Ideas,
by Mike Spakowski, Atomicdust
I didn’t always work at Atomicdust.
Before we started the company 19 years ago, a couple of the founding partners and I worked at Lawrence Group, an architecture and design firm. I loved my time there, I learned a lot, and much of their culture and approach to projects shaped what Atomicdust is today.
I continued watching Lawrence Group over the years, always impressed by their work and the culture behind it. So when we got a phone call from Lawrence Group asking about a website design project, we jumped at the chance to get to work with their brilliant team—one that I knew would be open to big ideas and new approaches.
Duck, duck, duck, goose.
Ok, let’s talk about the goals of a professional services website and ultimately, its brand.
The goal of marketing professional services firms should always be to articulate difference. You want to eliminate, as much as possible, the brand’s comparability with competitors.
It’s a balancing act. You don’t want to be so far different that the brand is totally removed from the category, but you don’t want to blend in.
Lawrence Group’s existing website was good but getting a little dated, and associates weren’t directing prospects to it anymore.
The new site needed to help the firm stand out in the market and create a strong experience that would inform, inspire and reassure clients and prospects.
That goal, to help the Lawrence Group differentiate itself in its industry, drove every decision we made.
Insert firm name here.
Through a competitive audit, we found an almost universal formula that architecture firms use for their websites: a huge photo of a building they designed at the top of the homepage (usually shot at sunset—or photoshopped to look like it was shot at sunset) followed by grids of photos of other projects and buildings.
This of course looks nice, but it has become the design pattern for architecture firms.
Also, the messaging most firms use tends to be formulaic. Most rely on one of two messages as differentiators: “Our projects are great and come in on budget!” or “Our people make the difference!”
The thing is, Lawrence Group could truthfully use these claims—they have amazing work, and remarkable people—but we needed a way to articulate that was different or interesting.