Centsible Spending Solutions is a financial nonprofit based in Angola, Indiana. They offer financial advice and budget planning services at little to no cost to their clients.
We work in an unforgiving industry. Designers are a dime a dozen. There are thousands of designers who possess more talent in their pinky finger than many of us could ever dream of having. And many of these designers are out of work. So when we say that second chances are hard to come by, it's a criminal understatement. If a company doesn't like the work we've done for them, not a single impediment could keep them from hiring a better design team for cheaper.
That's why we felt incredibly grateful to get a call from the folks at Centsible Spending Solutions (one of our first clients ever!). It was time for an overhaul. Their website required a long overdue redesign for both their UX and UI. This was a second chance - an opportunity to revisit one of our old designs and show off our own growth. We'll spend the next several paragraphs explaining the changes we made and offering justifications for each.
When we first began working with Centsible Spending Solutions, the organization's entire awareness campaign was operating through word-of-mouth and paper pamphlets. They wanted a website to let potential clients know that not only are they still in operation, but they also hold a grip on modernity. Financial planning best-practices ten years ago differ than today's standards. More specifically, this organization needed a website that reflected their joyful, laid-back style, while still maintaining a high level of professionalism. They operate in the financial industry, after all, which can be notoriously stiff; financial organizations need to present as trustworthy and stable.
In the 2020 redesign, we wanted the website to maintain those same qualities: joyful and laid-back, yet trustworthy and stable. But we needed some real work on the logo, the illustrations/imagery used throughout the site, and the language used to describe what exactly the organization does.
Above you can see the concept we eventually decided to run with. You can check out the live site here. You'll notice an entirely new logo in the corner. We needed something a little simpler and distinct, in an effort to give the brand a bit more personality. A simpler logo also makes the brand a bit more recognizable.
After redesigning the logo, we decided we needed an entirely new color palette. The financial industry is flooded with green color palettes. Maybe because American dollars are green? Regardless of the reason, so many firms in the finance industry feature some sort of green as their primary color, it's almost trite. Plus we wanted something a bit more up-tempo and vibrant, so we went with a red-orange gradient. You'll see that gradient featured all throughout the site.
Many of our designs begin with a sketch in a notebook, and this project proved no different. From my pen and paper sketches, we designed the site in Figma. Previously, we hand-coded the site in Visual Studio Code, using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. This time, however, we hosted and implemented the site with Webflow, a web design/hosting tool that has made our lives a lot easier in recent months.
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