As somebody who grew up with an accountant for a father, I’ve always been taught the value of money and the reassuring precision of sums that add up. You know where you stand, for good or ill. This exactitude has an echo in the satisfaction of geometry and symmetry.

Not every piece of brand design we work on has to follow rules or be symmetrical – life would be rather dreary if so. However, when working on a corporate finance logo and web design brief, there’s an argument for finding a rather specific balance.

It’s a perspective that has been realised for business consultants Harrier Partners and the branding work we’ve just completed for them.

Just recently in the studio, we’ve been throwing around a new theory:  that every piece of creative we work on is actually ‘a brand project’.

Our theory is that every time we complete a piece of design it advances a brand in some way. That’s a punchy claim, but the more we started thinking about it, the more it just happens to be true.

Rare is the piece of design that we do that is without any sort of innovation. Equally unusual is collaborating with a brand that has guidelines so exhaustive that every eventuality has been considered. In fact these gradual ways of redefining your brand aren’t a problem but actually, we believe, positive incremental changes that should be embraced.

With a creative brand guardian overviewing the work, these could be seen as investments in the future of the brand.

Everyone’s got a question. Nobody understands everything. If you think your website explains every possible detail about your business and its services I’ll show you someone who reads it differently. Chances are that even if you have covered all the angles, someone vital will miss the part where you explained in detailed bullet-points that very thing they were wondering about.

Voice activated systems such as Siri or Alexa mean these exchange are invariably conducted in a questions and answers format. It’s a prevailing trend that is becoming embedded in the psyche of web users, however they search. So how to address these in a wider context? A good shortcut could be bringing back an old Frequently Asked Questions page – FAQ – in a fresh, customer-focussed way.

With this in mind, here are some thoughts on how best to reimagine this Web 1.0 feature for a new era.

When is a website not just a website? My answer: when it helps you out. I don’t just mean that the site sells something or lets you source information like a train time (though those are both really helpful), but when you can actually retrieve something almost physical that you need.

I mention this because we’ve been thinking recently about the ways in which websites can actually move beyond being just a ‘business portfolio’ and evolve into an interactive, genuinely useful, perhaps even personalised resource.

No doubt there will be many industries for which this idea of a site being genuinely personalised in the future, but in the first instance we’ve been working on a fresh take on secure client login areas for financial services businesses.

In December we completed six months of work on a new website for ORIS, a classic German manufacturing brand based just outside Stuttgart.

An iconic business trading in bicycle carrier and towbars for more than half a century, the brand had begun to dilute after a series of mergers and buy-outs. Our project was to create a standalone site, bringing this fantastic brand back to the prominence it deserves.

With a Europe-wide audience, the site will eventually appear in many languages, but first up was German and English. So began a fascinating project creating a multi-lingual website.

Our Creative Director Richard recently sat down with Amy McIntosh, Managing Editor of Furniture, Lighting & Decor. Based in Illinois, the magazine and busy sourcing website for purchase influencers reaches tens of thousands of subscribers.

They discussed best practice around user experience for interior design websites and how designers and specifiers can make the most of the web.