Business consulting website design

The design brief. A consultancy site covering financial planning and investment management for professional clients. The audience is conservative and sceptical, and the design has to signal seriousness without tipping into the visual clichés the category is drowning in.

Black and white throughout. The entire site runs in monochrome — photography, typography, interface, all of it. This is the defining decision and it is a strong one. Removing colour entirely removes any possibility of looking cheap or trend-driven, and it forces the composition and the photography to carry the whole design. It also ages far better than any palette, which matters for a firm selling long-term thinking.

The client logo band. Recognisable company marks run across a solid black strip directly beneath the hero. Positioning social proof at that exact point — immediately after the opening statement, before any explanation of services — answers the credibility question at the moment it is being asked, and the black band makes it impossible to scroll past.

Alternating asymmetric sections. Below, services alternate image-left and image-right, with the photographs deliberately not aligned to a shared baseline and set at different sizes. The irregularity keeps a long page of similar content from becoming monotonous, and the generous white space between blocks gives each service room to register on its own.

Metaphorical photography. A seedling in cupped hands for financial planning, chess pieces for investment management. Visual metaphor is normally a risk, but in monochrome and at this scale it reads as editorial rather than corporate stock — closer to a newspaper's business section than a brochure.

Typography. A large, tightly-tracked serif for headings against small light body copy. Serif carries the institutional weight the category needs, and the strong size contrast between heading and body creates hierarchy without any colour or rules to do it.

Restrained calls to action. Plain read more links with a thin arrow, not filled buttons. For a professional services audience an aggressive button undercuts the tone the rest of the design has carefully built.