Description:

With over 30 years’ experience, Ignite is an Aotearoa success story that is now home to a global team of 160+ professionals across five design studios. The diversity of their design experience and strong team culture allows them to take a fully integrated, holistic design approach to projects of varying scale and complexity, both local and international. Their scope of work covers a range of architectural disciplines from commercial to residential, retail to entertainment, hospitality to hotels.

Ignite believes good design starts with real life human connections, intelligent questions, and the practice of listening. They have an empathy bias and remain bravely curious, no matter what.

In 2020, during the multiple lockdowns in Aotearoa, Ignite bravely took the opportunity to rethink the way they portrayed themselves to the market through their website.

The challenge
Like many great design firms, Ignite has constantly refined their offering over many years of successful projects. In 2020 they had firmly outgrown their own website, their value proposition, their client base and their results were not reflected on their digital presence.

We were engaged to give Ignite a new visual language and voice to their unique proposition in the market. Having had 30 years experience in the market, we had to talk to their customers to really understand why they valued Ignite. What was unique, and different about their approach? How are they different?

After conducting key client interviews and analytics, we honed-in on some ‘truths’ that stood as pillars for our design approach. They we’re;

People first
Ignite is a people driven firm. Therefore, their people needed to be considered as strongly as their work. The convention for architecture firms to focus on the work with a modest consideration for the people. Our analytics and interviews told us, one of the most important factors when choosing Ignite was their extraordinary people.

Commercially Astute
The other ‘truth’ that Ignite clients described to us, was that they were commercially more astute than their competition, understanding the holistic project objectives and designing buildings, spaces, and places that exceeded design briefs and commercial outcomes. Something truly rare in the architecture space.

The challenge was to represent who Ignite is, online. We spent almost a year researching, designing concepts, refining their digital brand presence, wrestling with everything from existential questions to button pixel size.

We opted for a co-design process where client and studio lines we’re completely blurred. We believe in a ‘one-team’ approach and so did Ignite. We think our collaboration has resulted in a website that speaks to Ignites unique position, their unique approach and their unique proposition.

The design we created together has a warmth that echoes the people that work there. The colour palette reflects this and was accentuated providing more depth and richness to the online presence.

The typography has a precision that alludes to their specificity on projects. The layout breaks a traditional grid to speak of their people centric, organic approach to getting very commercial results.