STRATUM
A structural engineering consultancy that had spent a decade hiding behind safe corporate branding. We ripped it down to the load-bearing bones and rebuilt from raw concrete up.
The Problem
Stratum's founders were winning contracts on reputation alone. Their brand looked like a 2014 accounting firm — blue gradients, stock photography of handshakes, a site that took four clicks to reach a single project. Competitors with weaker portfolios were landing bigger briefs because their positioning felt more authoritative.
The brief: stop apologising. Build something that announces structural authority the second the page loads. Raw material. No decoration that isn't structural.
Deliverables
Timeline: 11 weeks from brief to live. Single stakeholder lead. Two revision rounds. No committees.
Structural Audit
Tore apart the existing brand. Interviewed five engineers, two clients, one lost-pitch debrief. Mapped where the current identity was actively costing Stratum trust in tender rooms. Identified the core tension: technically exceptional firm, visually anonymous. The design problem was clear before a pixel was drawn.
Identity Foundation
Three brand directions, each architecturally distinct. Direction A: raw brutalist — exposed structure, no apology. Direction B: precision engineering — Swiss-influenced technical rigour. Direction C: material poetry — concrete as canvas. The client chose A without hesitation. We refined it for two weeks: wordmark weight, grid logic, the exact proportions of the rust accent bar.
Digital Architecture
Sitemap: 7 pages. No more. Projects, Studio, People, Process, Sectors, Contact, and the detail template. Every nav decision justified by removing one step. We prototyped three homepage structures — vertical scroll panorama, horizontal filmstrip, and the final brutalist grid. The grid won for its immediate structural authority on any viewport size.
Build & Motion
Built in Astro for Core Web Vitals. Hard-cut motion throughout — clip-path reveals, no easing on title entry (just the blunt cut). Lenis for smooth scroll, GSAP ScrollTrigger only for counter increments and gallery stagger. Tested at 3G throttle. LCP under 1.1s. No JavaScript on first paint. Motion gated behind prefers-reduced-motion throughout.
Handoff & Launch
Delivered a 140-page brand standards document, Figma component library (82 components), and developer handoff in Storybook. Deployed to Cloudflare Pages. Domain transfer, DNS, redirect map for 23 old URLs. Live in 48 hours. Post-launch monitoring via Cloudflare Analytics for 30 days.
From an average of 4 cold inbounds per month to 17. All qualified. Three converted to contracts within 90 days of launch.
LCP 0.9s, CLS 0.02, INP 58ms. Fastest site in the structural engineering sector by our audit of 40 competitors.
First project won post-launch was 2.1× their previous largest contract. Client attributed the proposal win partly to perceived authority from the new brand materials.
James Holford
Director, Stratum Engineering
We walked into a tender last March and the client said they'd seen the site before the meeting. For the first time in fourteen years, our brand did work before we opened our mouths.
Let's Build
Something
Raw.
We work with ambitious clients who know what they want and aren't afraid to show it. No committees, no brand-by-consensus. Just structural thinking and decisive design.