GPAD

When GPAD launched Common, they asked us to evolve their identity and website to better reflect a more collaborative and open way of working.

One of the most distinctive elements is the homepage.

Two opposing columns scroll through a changing mix of completed projects, working drawings, material studies, collaborators, testimonials, models and fragments of studio life. The selection is generated dynamically, so each visit produces a different combination of content.

That randomness was important. GPAD is an energetic practice, with a lot happening beyond the finished building, and we wanted the website to capture more of that.

It means the homepage doesn’t simply become a sequence of polished architectural photographs. Process sits alongside outcome. People sit alongside projects. Rough sketches and materials have as much opportunity to appear as finished buildings.

Technically, the system also gives the team freedom to keep adding to that pool of content without having to continually redesign the homepage itself.

Millers Quay

Millers Quay is a waterside rental development at Wirral Waters, with apartments ranging from compact one-bedroom homes to two-storey duplexes.

The website has to do two slightly different jobs. It needs to communicate what living at Millers Quay feels like, but it also has to help someone move quickly from general interest to finding a home that suits them.

The homepage uses large-scale typography, photography and movement to establish the character of the development and its setting. A parallax gallery combines architecture, interiors, views across the water and wider lifestyle imagery, rather than treating the scheme simply as a collection of available units.

Once someone begins looking more seriously, the site shifts towards more practical information.

The apartment explorer lets users browse by apartment type and move between layouts, floor plans, sizes and specifications. Different configurations can be compared without repeatedly leaving the page, making what could be a fairly dense property search much easier to understand.

That same thinking carries through into availability and enquiry, keeping the route from browsing the development to identifying a specific home as short as possible.

It means the more emotive side of the website and the functional side are doing different jobs, but still feel like part of the same experience.

St Johns Shopping Centre

St Johns is a Liverpool institution. Situated at the heart of the city centre since 1969, there aren’t many locals – or visitors to the city – who haven’t passed through its doors.

That brings an unusually broad mix of users to the website, often looking for very different things: a particular retailer, opening hours, current offers, accessibility information, parking charges or how the on-site EV chargers work.

As part of the wider rebrand, the website introduced a completely new visual direction for St Johns – bolder, brighter and much more confident than what had gone before.

Alongside that, we used user research and analytics to understand which information people were looking for most frequently, how they were arriving at it and where unnecessary steps were getting in the way.

That informed a new information architecture built around the most common user journeys, rather than around the internal structure of the organisation.

The main navigation was simplified and made expandable, while key information was brought much closer to the surface. The aim was that the most frequently requested content could be reached within a single click, wherever someone entered the site.

The result is a much more distinctive expression of the St Johns brand, underpinned by a simpler and more useful structure.