Web-design as an extension of design practice

Back in 2015 when I was starting the company, I looked around for good web designers. None seemed appealing to me. The ones I liked, were far beyond my hiring capacity. I figured out that in our industry, a website isn’t something built once and forgotten- it’s an online portfolio where you would routinely add projects every quarter as you go.

It’s also the face of your design studio out in the world. Potential clients approach you for the design and content you have put in. They identify your tastes by the style you have employed. You even attract good similar-minded talent from a well-built website.

People want to work for your just because you have a good website and think you are awesome. The halo bias plays out very well to your advantage even if you are a small business.

I also figured out that our online aura should be a mirror of the good work we do out in the field. We had a strong affinity for contemporary design and we want that to be reflected. We are all for minimalism and clean spaces. That needs to be translated as well.

We want to be the future studio that nobody is so far and the website should evoke a certain sense of utopia just as Apple does. A near-perfect world. In words, images, background colours and transitions.

Put all these things together into a brief and I ended up doing it myself. There wasn’t a web designer I could find who had the calibre to distil all of these abstracts and still communicate clearly. And in addition, cracking this code for once will unlock a lifetime of web-design expertise (for free, of course) that I could use to revolutionize how interior designer portfolios are presented. After all, I am a designer, ain’t I?

And I created our first website in 2015 and that effort combined with our selective design approach brought in 5 years of lead generation. It took us from being a freelancer to a company that the market wanted to take seriously.

In 2021, after we moved to Dubai, I created version 2 of it, but it failed to capture the full extent of my concept partly because there weren’t the right tools at that time. Towards the end of 2021, I finally figured out how to work on better platforms than I previously used. And six months later, here we are launching our version 3 and the second best web design so far I know in Dubai’s design market.

To be clear, we don't design websites for a living. We just did it for ourselves as a way of getting our message across a wave of design companies competing for the same thing as we do. And also, the actual work has to complement whatever is on the pages. The interior design website and the interior practice should have a synergy between them and must be felt as entities coming from the same source.

This current version is hyper minimalistic, and clean with a heavy influence of art and transitions. A lot of effort has been poured into getting all the typography correct and establishing a hierarchy in communicating the services. It has also been reverse-engineered to work well as a presentation for pitches. The mobile version is as good as the desktop version and scrolls gracefully on your devices.

So go ahead and explore for yourself and let me know what you think.