Innovation and continuity: new website design for financial group Britannia

The motto that I kept going back to as we began this fantastic project was ‘you can’t bake a new cake with the same ingredients as the old one’. My idea was to create a new website design for financial group Britannia, retaining many of their longstanding brand totems yet thinking about them in a completely new way. A fresh recipe, if you will.

Our new Britannia website is the first evidence of an 18 month brand review project we’ve been engaged with. It’s a fantastic example of taking highly specific brand guidelines, moving almost entirely within those, yet creating an entirely new interpretation as the creative springboard for the web design. And, needless to say, finding a few new ingredients along the way…

How do you get the best out of a web design project using current branding?

As we began our work for the Britannia Financial Group, the first challenge we set ourselves was to reset external perceptions of the business. This was more than just a design exercise. The previous website had been quite deliberately focussed on the company and its functions, what we were going to do within this redesign was structural. To turn that previous structure inside out and think service-first.

In all our work, our first question is, ‘will this work for the user?’. Our view is that this approach leads design best practice, but also logic suggests that if it doesn’t work for the target audience, the website is not going to achieve the aims of the firm behind the site.

With this in mind, our site planning placed Britannia’s business lines, their core expertise, front and centre in a completely new way. We proposed slicing into these two ways.

1. The first was adding new landing pages covering their services around base metals, commodities, derivatives, foreign exchange and securities.
2. The second was to rethink the pages of the two pillars of their group, Britannia Global Markets and Britannia Global Investments, embedding them with specialism and the personalities behind that structure.

What are the key elements to blend for great new website?

Remember the cake? Back to those new ingredients.

• At the outset of the project we had full sight of Britannia’s incredible image library, mostly created by renowned photographer Philip Vile prior to our involvement with the project. This incredible starting point meant we could review the full set of shots that had been taken, many of which had never been used by the firm to date. This was the first fresh element we added to the mix.
• All these were still photographs: our next idea was to make the images move. All the shots in the image library were taken in and around Britannia Financial Group’s headquarters at the ‘scalpel’ building in the City of London. We returned to these locations and shot completely new time-lapse video which appears across the site to give a sense of movement and dynamism to our designs.
• The third element? More movement. A series of vector animations and carefully applied interaction design. This is precisely the kind of subtlety that I consider ideal to add interest and engagement with the new website design of a financial group. With so much of that business landscape and its design tropes being familiar, the team at Britannia really liked these compelling moments that reach out to the user and maintain their interest.
• Finally, in common with much of our work for financial services business, the Britannia brand guidelines had a single typeface available which offered little flexibility for our design work when it came to a particular passion of ours: new typography. We sought special dispensation to add a new serif typeface to the set, giving a sense of formality and seriousness to the branding, but often applied in a conversational manner.

Seen together, we have retained all the core brand elements. Anything innovative we’ve added only compliments these, building a brand language that feels outward looking, solid and dynamic.

Can a website be launched as just one part of a branding project?

Completing a new website design for a financial group with many moving parts, including team members across multiple time-zones and financial regulations, is not ever going to be a speedy business.

Yet the end result in this instance has a freshness that belies this project’s lengthy gestation. A lot of this was driven by brilliant people. The board of Britannia were enthusiastic to embrace fresh design and our new ideas; having a central project manager at the firm guiding the process helped enormously too. I’m really grateful to all the fantastic people we worked with at every stage of the project.

As is so often the way, the first evidence of a lengthy piece of work is both a massive breakthrough and only its first step. To get here took a lot of inventiveness and new thinking. I believe this was helped by our enjoyment of working with a strong, pre-existing brand identity and finding a different angle or ‘way in’ to it.

There’s so much more of this fantastic project that we’ve completed that will roll out, most of it for the internal team. For now, I am really excited to see this first major public-facing piece of work out in the world, offering a new start for such a dynamic business.

Our approach to new website design for a financial group

We often act for umbrella businesses, the most familiar circumstance being a series of companies that are owned by the same parent. In that situation we’re often obliged to retain all current branding but find a fresh way for all these entities to work together, creating a new website for a financial group.

These projects tend to be what we call ‘reputational’, requiring a highly tailored approach that is required from a compliance perspective. These often involve a very specific series of gateways for terms of use, which often vary depending on the region of the site visitor.

Whether you’re in the UK or work across EMEA and beyond, we can work on designs from the creative to the corporate, depending on your brief and budget.

Call us on 020 7351 4083 or email us direct.

Find out more

• Our portfolio page showcasing our work for Britannia
• Visit the new Britannia Financial Group website
• All our website design for financial group businesses