McGarrah Jessee
Revitalizing a creative agency’s website
My role: UX & UI Design
Team: CCO, CMO, UX Lead, UX Copywriter, Producer, Digital Production, Developer
Background
For years, McGarrah Jessee has been one of the leading creative agencies in Austin, TX. But by early 2020, their website was feeling stagnant and outdated. It no longer accurately reflected the agency’s evolution.
Leadership wanted an entirely new website to showcase McJ’s recent rebrand and repositioning. It would need to better communicate what McJ is really about — its work, values, and vibe — with the overall goal of attracting the interest of prospective clients and talent.
Branding update in early 2020
Project Goals
Based on our research and stakeholder input, we needed to accomplish the following:
Implement McJ’s recent branding redesign and newly defined positioning: “we grow cult brands”
Make it clear how McJ stands apart from competitors
Present a selection of our most impactful case studies
Increase awareness of McJ overall
The Big Redesign
All Hands on Deck
This was the last project I contributed to during my time at McJ. The project timeline was expedited and our internal resources were limited. Not to mention, the pandemic hit as we began the project and we shifted to working from home.
Our team needed to veer from our typical processes and get creative about how to pull this off within scope.
Site Architecture
The site map and content strategy were determined during collaborations with our strategists and C-level leadership. Our formerly content-bloated site would be streamlined into fewer, more focused pages that get to the heart of who McJ is.
Divide and Conquer
Steps that are typically staggered needed to be tackled simultaneously due to the condensed timeline.
Our UX writer started fleshing out the content as our developers began building a code base. Meanwhile, myself and my UX lead started to solve for some design problems.
How can we implement the vibrant new McJ branding on the website in a way that doesn’t compete with the content on the site — and is still accessible?
How can we make the website a more dynamic, visually interesting experience than before?
Design
I began translating the new, high-level McJ branding into global website styles like type choices, HEX colors and UI elements. I used the vibrant new brand colors sparingly with an overall dark theme so that images of the work would pop. We wanted the agency’s case studies to be the star of the show.
Meanwhile, our UX Lead concepted motion and interaction designs to create a more energetic site experience. We also had the help of a designer/illustrator to create unique site assets, such as a dynamic capabilities map and custom icon sets.
Outcome
The new McJ website conveys the actual ethos of the agency: confidence, creativity, passion, and smart work. The updated McJ branding is certainly present, but doesn’t detract from the work featured on the site. The case studies strike a balance of powerful visuals, results, and supporting the agency’s mission of building cult brands that people get excited about.
Challenges & Take-Aways
The collapsed process and timeline posed challenges (you know, that metaphor of building a plane while flying it).
We dove directly into high-fidelity design as we simultaneously figured out content and hierarchy for each page, skipping over steps of our typical UX process.
Overall, we were able to completely redesign the agency’s website way faster than any previous site redesigns, considering we lost internal resources who needed to hop on client projects along the way.
This project was a great lesson in jumping in, getting scrappy, and collaborating to make things happen!