Brand promise 'Building unforgettable stories' becomes a tangible experience on Gielissen.com

Gielissen designs and builds interiors, exhibition stands, exhibition spaces and events for the biggest brands in the world. They are market leaders in their field. That leaves room for creativity, but they also stay critical. Qualities we appreciate. 

In early 2020, Partout was commissioned to develop a new website that would visualise a new brand positioning. Instead of carrying out the assignment on our own, we suggested: "Let's do it together". 

Design sprint

The project with Gielissen started with a Design Sprint: an interactive working session in which we gather insights and inspiration together. With those insights, we came up with and created concepts. We eventually chose one concept and turned it into a prototype that we tested with the target audience. That way you validate straight away whether your idea works. Gielissen was just as enthusiastic about the Design Sprint as we were, but then the global coronavirus pandemic broke out. Suddenly we could no longer work in the same room. That made an intensive working session difficult. Or so you'd think. 

We rapidly translated the winning formula of a Design Sprint into a digital version. We completed a successful sprint entirely online. The outcome? A prototype of a new website, with all the concepts and pages. The concept was tested with Gielissen stakeholders from various business units and international offices. We also tested the prototype with users. Stakeholders and customers alike received the prototype enthusiastically. 

Presenting the new brand together with the design department

For the visual design, we worked closely with Gielissen's creative team. This collaboration allowed us to move quickly and work more efficiently on the end product. In a short time, we arrived at a creative translation of the brand positioning. By turning the company story, with its motto 'building unforgettable stories', into a digital design magazine, Gielissen's portfolio is presented in an unforgettable way. 

Motion design

One advantage of digitising a magazine is that we don't have to design everything statically. Digital offers more ways to add movement. Visual elements can move, stick or flow over one another. To translate Gielissen's company story properly into design, we first prototyped the pages in the tool Framer. Framer makes it possible to animate designs quickly and well, and to export them to the browser. 

The end result? A design that doesn't feel one-dimensional, but agile, with a sense of depth. A website that does justice to the company story. And a site that is rock solid from a technical point of view. All of this came about through great collaboration between Partout and Gielissen's team of creatives.