Evolution of the 52LTD Brand and Website
We built a new website and evolved the 52 Limited brand.
Companies do this all the time but — true to form — our intentions were a little different than our industry peers. We didn’t change things to shock you into noticing us. We didn’t update the website so it could stay on trend. We’re not interested in those kinds of gimmicks. We aim to connect our contacts in the creative + technology industries, candidate to client and community to community, in the real world. That’s our reason for being.
We wanted a website that would directly serve that goal. We wanted to be deliberate in the process of renewing our digital properties and we spent the better part of a year in research, discussion, and implementation with some talented friends of ours in the fields of design, strategy, development, and illustration.
The first piece of the puzzle was engaging creative director Duane King, a longtime friend of 52 Limited and a Designspeaks board member. Duane was on a well-earned sabbatical after wrapping a three-year stint as creative director for HUGE/KingCoyle, a design innovation lab in Portland for Brooklyn-based HUGE. Did you know Fast Company named him one of the 50 Most Influential Designers in America? Duane largely lets his design do the influencing. In person, he listens more than he speaks. Having known 52 Limited from our community work and early beginnings, Duane thought he could bring something unique and essential to our redesign and brand evolution. His buy-in was the first important step in putting together the right mix of collaborators to build the kind of website we envisioned at 52ltd.com.
For development, Duane had the extremely talented team at Matter Supply Co in mind from the start. We knew they were the right choice after our very first planning meeting because they spent the session trying to understand the WHY of our work flows in order to build the WHAT of the website, instead of simply estimating how to build out our list of feature requests. They conducted focus group sessions with some of our client contacts and met with creative + tech professionals who have both worked with us and those who have not. While the process took longer than either of us anticipated, it uncovered needs and identified efficiencies that would have never surfaced without such a deep dive on our audiences and our processes.
Duane’s design proposal emphasized supreme utility, beauty across platforms, and space to breathe while Matter Supply Co developed a lightweight site that serves the readers aims (see Jobs-To-Be-Done theory) via work flows, existing APIs, and some of the smoothest action you can find on the internet. With the architecture in place, we went looking for a certain visual element to elevate the whole project.
Enter Always With Honor, a husband/wife graphic design and illustration studio with a unique and impressive portfolio. Duane wanted the site architecture to pop with some illustrative touches, and the particular body of icon work Always With Honor produced led to some investigations with Matter Supply Co about how to best bring them to life with vector animation. On top of the icons, Always With Honor produced two congratulatory illustrations for success moments such as submitting a job application or inquiring about finding talent.
With the new website, we’ve made it easy for employers to access our considerable talent pools and for job seekers to review the opportunities we’ve targeted for outside interviewing. Just answer a couple questions or apply in a few clicks with your LinkedIn. We’re also curating a community calendar of selected events we think you should know about and we’ve written out the FAQ the creative+tech staffing industry has always needed.
So today you’ll find a new experience at 52ltd.com — a beautiful, lightweight, useful, and sometimes even surprising resource for our clients, our talent, and our community. We couldn’t be more proud to show it off and we couldn’t have done it without the intelligence, curiosity, and hard work of Duane, Matter Supply Co, and Always With Honor.
