Brand Design, Experience Design, Web Development

APG Reclamation

APG reclamation specialise in architectural and decorative salvage mainly consisting of stone and cast ironwork. Their main focus is based on exterior items and garden antiques, such as stone troughs and statues as well as Yorkstone paving and specialist building stone for gardening and landscape projects.

We were thrilled when approached by APG reclamation to create their brand and product website, and were ready to build them a clean, modern website with a comprehensive, yet simple content management system (CMS) to give the client full backend control.
Client
APG Reclamation, Sowerby Bridge, UK

Deliverables
- Brand Design
- Experience Design
- Web Development
- Infrastructure Setup
- Digital Asset Creation

The Project

To kick off the project, we conducted several meetings and exchanged numerous emails to ensure a clear and comprehensive understanding of their vision, whilst gaining a deep understanding of their goals and objectives.

Through discovery and research we found this sector to be quite one dimensional and lacklustre, with dull 'brands' and their respective websites built on unresponsive templates that haven't seen a web developer in forever!

Our goal was simple;  create a distinctive brand, and design, build and develop a website that matched their objectives and functioned as a modern, easy-to-use online tool.

Brand Design

As we started the design process of creating a visual identity and cohesive brand elements to represent APG's products and services, we knew personality was key to differentiate them from their competitors.

We tackled this through the strategic development of various design elements such as brand mark, typography, colours and overall brand aesthetics to communicate the brand's values. Choosing appropriate fonts and typography styles helped us create a consistent visual language for the brand, with a purposeful mix of classic and modern that reinforces the notion of reclamation; old being repurposed.
At the core of the business is reclamation, to repurpose, recycle and upcycle so the A of APG was a natural starting point to be crafted into a central visual element that represents the face of the brand with its upward trajectory.

We created a variety of unique, initial designs to reflect the brand's identity and purpose, settling on the clients final choice that is also representative of cobble stones.

For colour, we re-worked tones the client had previously used and purposefully stripped them back to create a limted pallete to increase impact.

Experience Design

Alongside the brand development process, we created a series of sketches so that we could start to visually craft the initial website concept. The sketches were simple pencil drawings, serving as the starting point for the experience design, so we could refine and produce the best customer journey to acheive the clients goals.
Throughout the design process, we aimed to maintain consistency in terms of colour scheme, typography, and overall visual style. These sketches served as a foundation for the subsequent stages, ensuring that the client's vision and requirements were properly captured before moving forward with high-fidelity design and web development.

Web Development

Once we had a clear design concept, we planned the development process, outlining the project's scope, goals, and timelines, breaking down the design into smaller sections to make the development process more manageable.

The primary, and integral function for this client was the ability to manage their own products, and while this system would not be transactional, it had to function in the same way a store would behave. The basket and purchase elements were replaced with a customised contact element.




After setting up our development environment with the necessary tools and technologies, we installed and configured the content management system (CMS) and ensured that our web servers and databases were properly configured.
To begin translating the design into a functional website, we began by converting and developing the primary navigation from the XD design. The navigation would be fully responsive having two defined states to acommodate all viewports, as we focused on structuring the primary navigation using HTML (BEM) and applied styles and visual elements using SCSS.

The footer was built with the CSS grid system to ensure uniformity across all responsive states, giving us enhanced control over the span and order of elements for the mobile device viewport.

Web Development

Once we had a clear design concept, we planned the development process, outlining the project's scope, goals, and timelines, breaking down the design into smaller sections to make the development process more manageable.

The primary, and integral function for this client was the ability to manage their own products, and while this system would not be transactional, it had to function in a similar way, with the basket and purchase elements replaced with a customised contact element.

To achieve this we lent on two dependable plugins that we use time and again on most of our web development projects due to their robust nature. The first is Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) that gives us as web developers the ability to create bespoke interface designs, along with a huge array of customisation power over WordPress; our CMS of choice.

The second is Gravity Forms that is present on each individual product page. This is customised to include a unique ID code for each product that the client generates when they add a new line item. Ensuring that when contact is made for an item, the client knows eactly which product they are referencing. Neat!

The Desktop Experience

Alongside a great mobile experience, the desktop version of this website could not be overlooked, as it is incredibly important, providing a richer and more immersive browsing experience.

The Result

Year-over-year comparison (2021 vs 2022)

- 500% increase in campaign clicks
- 20% improvement in impressions
- Increase in organic post engagement (Instagram and Facebook)
- Addition of TikTok

New audience performance

Student and younger audiences’ positive response to this campaign showed promise enough for UATL to agree to more student-forward campaigns in 2023.

The Result

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