The website needed to sidestep typical corporate tropes. The brief also detailed the requirement for the website to denote a sense of quality, synonymous with luxury brands, to mirror the expectations of the HNWI segment of their target market. Our challenge was to realise these ambitions in a tight timeline, ready for the September launch date set in stone.

The new brand and strategic direction revolved around the core message — ‘In your corner’. To be successful from a branding perspective, the new website needed to platform this message in a highly professional, sensitive manner; by illustrating SDS’s physical presence in their community’s corner of London, imparting their empathic understanding of personal matters, and communicating their unwavering commitment towards their client’s best interests.

On a practical level, the website needed to drive high-quality inquiries, serve as a credibility check in the instance of referrals and support top talent recruitment.

Painterly and expressive — the new SDS brand identity feels distinctive and warm. A heritage-inspired colour palette accompanies textural oil-painting style artwork depicting their city locale, and a mix of handwritten-style and modern serif fonts is used to balance the professional with a personal, human touch. The visual direction for the site had to replicate this sense of balance and distinctiveness, to launch the new brand, and serve the firm’s target audience.

The idea of ‘framing’ the artwork — to let the vibrancy and impact do the heavy lifting — revolved around a confident, minimal application of the brand assets. By borrowing common design themes from luxury brands, the site uses minimal, refined layouts that frame the visual and photography assets illustrating the two differentiators of the firm; the people, and the places they serve.

The idea of framing not only guided the restrained, gallery treatment of the artwork, but gave clear structure to the UI design and visual development of the site. The composition of the frames, paired with a subtle, delineated grid pattern emphasised the care and attention to detail present in the practice.

The more expressive elements of the brand were applied sparingly, paired with a sophisticated application of typography to deliver the polished, considered appearance set out in the brief. By exploring the use of colour drenches, the design uses scroll-based transitions that fade from dark to light to delineate between primary and secondary content, and guide users to the support they need.

SDS are a proudly resolution-focused firm, built on the belief they must not only be accessible, but approachable too. It’s the reason they maintain a physical presence in their London neighbourhoods, and the reason the architecture of the site needed to keep user journeys short and effective.

Rather than distancing the partners and solicitors from potential clients behind contact forms, or losing users in lengthy jargon-littered service descriptions, the content design focused on offering users immediate connection, and reassurance, in some of life’s most stressful moments.

The grid structure seamlessly guides users to the specialist they need, using sharp headers, and short, succinct copy blocks that use plain, human language. This reflection of SDS’s human approach to all legal matters is further supported by photography of the firm’s experts and selected testimonials, designed to emphasise their focus on finding resolutions in even the most difficult of circumstances.