legalsuper 

Established in 1989, legalsuper is Australia’s superannuation fund for the legal profession and manages more than $3.5 billion of retirement wealth for around 450,000 members. 

Legalsuper approached Luminary with a digital strategy, an architecture developed by a third party and a looming deadline to refresh the website to match their rebrand. Due to regulatory changes in Australia, the superannuation sector is becoming more competitive. Leglasuper wanted to stand out from the crowded field.

My role

– User experience
– Art direction
– Interface design
– Design management

The project

– Redesign from rebrand
– Completed at Luminary
– Live in March 2019
– Won 3 industry awards

My role was principal designer and art director. I was responsible for developing the overall aesthetic of the interface, communicating design decisions to the client and managing a senior designer and a junior designer. 

The project was challenging form a timeline perspective but also was my first whilst working remotely in a different timezone to the client (Amsterdam vs. Melbourne). I mitigated this challenge by working as close to Melbourne time as possible, making myself available for meetings from 6am my time.  Managing the team required an interesting mix of video chats and Slack to ensure the rest of my team got what they needed from me. 

I developed the above content model to facilitate early alignment between the development, design and content roles.
In essence mapping out how everything joined together. 

The first step was to adjust the third party architecture. legalsuper had chosen a headless CMS and I developed a content architecture and adjusted the original sitemap to take advantage of the benefits. 

I worked with legasuper to ensure that their content would look great no matter what it was or where it was placed. It was through this process I learnt that while content editors and marketing departments often demand more flexibility from content management systems; Their jobs are made more efficient by actually having less. We provided simple “buckets” with strictly defined expected content which created a much simpler process than using WYSIWYG areas all over the place. Thanks to the content architecture, the headless CMS accommodated this structured content approach perfectly. 

Questioning why something has been required is a keystone of my UX practice, underderstanding context is vital to putting forward excellent solutions. However, up untill this project I wouldn't have questioned requirments of the CMS, now I know they're as much UX territory as they are content or revelopment. 

Brand elements for legalsuper.

legalsuper's new branding was enigmatic, bold and contemporary; and was great start. The team at legalsuper were keen to break from convention for the digital interpretation.  

Part of the new brand were a set very rich photos of some of their members, looking at the camera as though they were in the middle of a very interesting conversation. They perfectly encapsulated the feeling of personable cool to balance out the content. 

Working with the image’s natural portrait orientation, I developed an interface whose hero banners ran down the page rather than across. Making this element a key part of the brands transition to the digital space, and goes a long way to satisfying the clients goal of standing out. 

The new brand really leans on typography and colour to communicate who legalsuper are and this is carried across to the the interface, which is bold and clear. 

A key consideration when designing an interface is reflecting the brand wholisiticly thoughought it. So that if someone were to make it black and white and cover up the logo, the interface still feels like that brand.  I believe we were successful in achiving this with legalsuper. 

The legalsuper team were incredibly happy with how their project was completed, and as a consequence Luminary use them as one of their primary references for new clients. 

To ensure the site stayed as good looking as when it was designed, we developed style guide documentation for the content editors. 

This one's award winning!

Winner - Financial Services
Australian Web Awards – 2019

More selected projects

The elevator pitch.  

I’ve been creating parts of the internet for more than 15 years and I’m completely in love with the digital medium. Design has the power to change the world and I work to be on the positive side of that change. My special skills are information architecture, user experience, mentoring and opening stuck jars.

Want more? I've written more; what it's like to work with me, and what I do for fun. 

Previously.

Creative Director at Bliss Media 
— 1 year, 1 month

Senior Designer at Reactive
 — 5 years, 11 months

Designer & Front end developer at Immersive 
— 5 years, 9 months

or call me +61 417 592 978