The artist and entrepreneur Charlotta Janssen needed a new website to showcase her innovative architectural project Motherstructures, a building concept of ultra-light and sculptural structures that function as contemporary versions of Art Nouveau canopies or winter gardens. The existing website was a half-baked maze of scattered images and incomplete information. I created a clean and user-friendly version that combined beautiful and inspiring imagery with a clear and accessible brand voice and easy navigation.
What I did:
- Creative direction & UX
- Content strategy & architecture
- Brand strategy & voice
- Wireframes and sitemap
- Copywriting
Setting a strategy
The objective of the website was to funnel potential customers through discovery to inquiry. Motherstructures’ story is compelling in several ways; it is about overcoming adversity through invention and creating beauty for a community as much as sparking interest in a smart and well-designed product. The website needed to uplift these different narratives while framing them within a clear information hierarchy that guided the user journey.
Creating the look and tone
In order to quickly wow potential customers with the beauty and ingenuity of the Motherstructures, the voice and look of the website had to make a strong impact. This meant creating a clean and uncluttered framework that allowed the images to breathe and using similarly clean and uncluttered language to break down the value propositions. I selected the WordPress template Twenty Twentyfour as the baseline of our design combined with custom elements inspired by websites from Dutch architecture and Scandinavian furniture brands.
Letting the work speak for itself
Showcasing built projects was the core purpose of the website. Since all the Motherstructures were custom-made and site-specific, each case study was a convincing example of creative problem-solving. By honing in on the design’s functionality we showed, rather than told, the viewer about its value. The descriptions of business impact and benefits were provided by the customers themselves, in powerful quotes.
Telling the story
Like many great inventions, Motherstructures was born out of a moment of acute necessity. Letting the founder Charlotta tell her story in first person created a connection with the reader who could relate to pandemic struggles and feel invested in the happy ending.
