Creating value and inspiring small creative shops to compete by being more resourceful and visually compelling.
Design is a complex discipline where explaining too much often defeats the purpose of its intent. Our objective was to enhance overall marketing capabilities and acumen through the use of visual design and storytelling.
Rizen can be a more resourceful marketing agency and focus attention on elevating creative value. They will be more capable of taking on larger-scale challenges and clients by showcasing previous successes in targeted industries.
Potential clients have compelling visuals to understand Rizen's capabilities and a clear path to engage with the creative, strategy and business development teams.
Rizen Creative (RC) is an intentionally small, digital marketing agency that helps underdogs compete and win in their respective industry spaces. Their focus is integrated branding, packaging, experiential and digital design. I was tasked with creating a more visual web experience based on the idea of showing versus telling.
They asked me to design a website that showed the versatility of the company's skill set with less words and more visually compelling assets. In order to achieve the goal, I reconfigured the information architecture, refactored top level navigation and interior page links, revised concept models and incorporated new case study content, site-wide.
In addition to in-person discovery sessions, I based design decisions on previous user data collected from Google Analytics and Hotjar and a variety of SEO/SEM resources. Wireframes and high-fidelity comps were created on whiteboards in early phases and further refined in Figma and protyped in Webflow.
— Ron Baker, Founder Rizen Creative
The Rizen Creative development team relied on a CMS framework called Umbraco. They used it exclusively to host their catalog of client websites and insisted on maintaining all assets through their current system.
They were initially hesitant to using Webflow as a staging and prototyping environment, but soon appreciated the efficiency it created throughout the handoff process.
By using Webflow, I built a one-to-one design comp from my working Figma file and create a high-fidelity prototype based on production code (html/css/js).
I routinely published the staging site to show responsiveness, hover states and micro-interactions that could easily be imported into Umbraco. This was an incredible time-saver and established a great working relationship with the dev team.
Rizen Creative (RC) needed a visual lead capture resource that functioned beyond a digital brochure—one that successfully conveyed their blue-collar working style, resourceful underdog culture, attention to detail and years of design and marketing expertise.
In order to achieve the desired results, I needed to understand the types of clients RC wanted to attract. Stakeholders aren't always able to articulate exactly what they want (or expect) from a marketing agency, but they know great work when they see it.
I applied this show-versus-tell mental model to the design process and worked with the creative team to build a service blueprint to accommodate a more visual experience. We worked collaboratively to enhance photography and illustration assets, and optimize content for SEO and CRO.
Through open communication and an iterative weekly review process, we were able to quickly move from discovery (research and synthesis) into the early phases of UX design (IA and wireframing). Each review evolved and assisted in informing the high-fidelity comps. From there we were able to successfully prototype and migrate to a development environment.
Upon launching the redesign, the Rizen Creative stakeholders reported a 183% increase in lead generation within six months. They have also reported a 58% increase in RFP success since 2021.
