Elegant Spaces

A few engineers and architects who left to start their own firm. Genuinely good at the work, and completely invisible everywhere the work was not.

The diagnosis

The problem was never demand. People were already searching for exactly what this firm did, in plain language, every week. The problem was that the firm was not there when they looked, and that anyone who did arrive by some other route found nothing that made the quality of the work obvious. Findable first, credible second. In that order, because credibility you cannot reach is a brochure.

The identity, and the one I lost

They had a vision for the logo and I put a lot of directions in front of them. They chose the one I liked least. It is their firm and their name, so it was their call to make, and I still think they got it wrong. Then I built the entire identity around their answer and did it properly, because a brand you are sulking about is a brand you deliver badly, and that is a worse outcome than losing an argument about a logo.

Organic search as the foundation

A search programme built around the services people actually type, not the ones the industry prefers to call them. Construction and architectural design get searched for in ordinary words, and matching that language rather than correcting it was most of the win.

The website and the brand surface

A design and build firm is judged on physical things. The site, the catalogue, the banners and the cards all had to say the same thing in the same voice, because a prospect usually meets two of them before they ever meet a person.

Performance media on top

Paid programmes across search and display to hold ground the organic work had not reached yet, and to stay present on the terms that mattered most while the slower asset compounded underneath it.

A CRM, because it is B2B

Architectural work is a long, considered, expensive decision. An enquiry that lands on a Tuesday and gets remembered on a Friday is an enquiry that has already gone elsewhere, so they got a CRM and, more importantly, a process to go with it. Software does not fix follow up. It just makes it obvious who is not doing it.

Owning the local map

Listings and directory presence tightened up so a local search resolved to this firm, with consistent detail everywhere it appeared. Unglamorous, close to free, and the single cheapest thing almost every local firm never gets round to doing properly.

Took a firm that did strong work nobody could find, and made it the one that turns up and looks the part when someone local goes looking.

Selected designs

A closer look at the work. Drag to rearrange, tap any piece to view it up close.