Their designers draw the website. We build exactly what they drew.

A design firm whose clients expect the website to match the drawing

Gensler is a global architecture, design, and planning firm. For some of its clients, the work includes a website, and the studio handles it the way it handles everything else: it designs the site, presents it, and gets it approved.

The person who feels what happens next is the studio's design director. The client has signed off on a drawing. If the site that goes live drifts from that drawing, the designer is the one who has to explain the difference.

Two of those clients are New Hudson Facades, a facade engineering and manufacturing company, and Coyle & Company, a signage and environmental graphics firm. Both sell visual work, and both needed websites that show it well.

Designing a website and building one are different jobs

A design studio is not a web development shop, and it should not have to become one. But a finished design still has to be turned into a working website, and there are two common ways that go wrong. The design gets poured into a ready-made template and comes out as an approximation. Or a developer treats the drawing as a suggestion, and the spacing, the type, and the image crops all wander.

Then there is everything after launch. Someone has to host the site and keep it updated. Someone has to answer when the client's marketing manager wants a page changed. None of that is design work, and all of it lands on the designers if nobody else picks it up.

The studio wanted a partner to take the drawing from approved to live, and to keep the site running afterward.

We build what was drawn, and make it easy to keep that way

We build each site from the design files, as its own custom theme. There is no ready-made template underneath, so the layout the client approved is the layout their visitors see. The design director reviews a site that matches the drawing and does not have to argue for it a second time.

We turn each designed layout into a section the client's staff can reuse. A marketing manager adds a project or a portfolio piece by filling in a section that already carries the design. New pages look like they belong, and nobody at the studio has to check them.

We make a large body of work easy to get through. On one site, visitors narrow the project list by project type and by location. On the other, a portfolio of several hundred pieces is sorted by the kind of sign or graphic. An architect looking for one type of work finds it quickly.

The designers stay designers

Both sites are live, and we host and maintain them. When the clients' staff need something, they come to us and the studio is not pulled back in. One example: the marketing manager at New Hudson Facades sends us digital contact cards for their staff. We host the files, so a code printed on a business card opens the card and saves the contact to a phone.

For the design director, the arrangement is simple. The studio designs, presents, and leads the client. We build what was approved, keep it running, and answer the small requests that follow. When the next client needs a website, the process is one everybody already knows.