Naval Group, world-leader in Naval Defence, brought us on for a collaborative project to restructure, redesign and redevelop their website. The website was commissioned to strengthen their reputation and brand image; support the group’s growth transformation, particularly in terms of recruitment; and drive business development, by demonstrating expertise and innovation.
A vast range of initiatives and projects means that Naval Group did not just need a space to present their work or tell their news stories, but a place for their viewers to participate. Interactive discussion boards, a powerful careers portal and press and media centres bring users into their ecosystem.
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A new structure
The new structure focused on addressing a wide and varied audience — internal teams, governments, the press, economic stakeholders, potential recruits and society at large.
Interviews with their leadership identified four main goals:
- Create collective pride as a corporate culture
- Highlight innovation to support talent acquisition
- Promote awareness of the company’s social utility
- Increase international reach as a new business objective
This translated to a revision of their menu architecture, contextualising words and content to the naval industry; the creation of immersive content-rich pages that combined text, image, audio and video to tell compelling stories; and the addition of user interactivity in ways that invite increased direct engagement with the group.
An immersive experience
One of the key drivers of the redesign was to create a compelling, immersive story around the naval defence industry — for clients and talent alike. Videos, cinemagraphs, moving line illustrations and micro animations were brought together with an enormous quantity of visual content to tell the story of ships, submarines and sovereignty.
A Modular System
Not just over years, but even during the few months of this project, the needs, stories and content that the Naval Group teams sought to present on their website evolved. An organisation as widespread and dynamic as theirs would not be well served with a standard website template. Instead of approaching the project as one of page design, we created a design system and a modular implementation framework.
A collection of content, media, decorative and actionable modules were designed and developed to allow for infinitely many permutations and combinations on pages. Instead of just making a website, we made a communication tool that will hopefully serve the client for several years to come.
This project won Silver in the TOP / COM GRANDS PRIX Corporate Business 2021, for website design.
