Communication Arts | Web Picks: themill.com

Background: The Mill’s new website was designed in order to reposition us as a global, full-service creative studio. Directed at new and prospective clients, it was built to showcase the wide range of creativity and services The Mill offers while highlighting the impact of the projects we collaborate on.

The site was just one part of an ongoing campaign focused on changing the conversation around The Mill. Traditionally known for our award-winning VFX capabilities, our company has evolved into a full-service production company, helping brands innovate through creative partnership. We use moving image, direction, design, interaction, built space, gamification, and virtual and augmented realities to build the future of interactive and immersive experiences. And while still championing our VFX legacy, our overall campaign aims to change people’s perception of The Mill from being much more than experts in visual effects.

There has been a focus on communicating this new brand story both internally and externally, arming a global sales force with the necessary collateral to sell what we do in a united capacity and taking into account all external platforms and marketing channels, too.

Design core: The infinite canvas is one of the core features of the site: it’s interactive, engaging and has an immersive feel to it. Each of the tiles sends users to either a detailed case study—showing The Mill’s capabilities—or to a website “Story” feature that covers anything from the latest highlight work to coverage to feature interviews with people who work at The Mill. With the canvas, we’re able to tell informative stories that capture the essence of The Mill’s way of working and what we can achieve with our creative partners. The canvas enables the visuals to speak for themselves while offering the user an opportunity to delve deeper and find out more about our process. It was also important for us to ensure that the website translated smoothly onto mobile to facilitate an easy user journey for mobile users.

Favourite details: The site has been transformed into a highly curated but regularly updated source of information about our company—more about what we do and why we do it, rather than a list of everything we have done in the past (although you can still discover this through our “Archive” page.) We’re proud of the look and feel; the infinite canvas is memorable and encourages exploration, which is exactly what we want users to do.

Navigation structure: Previously, our website fragmented the business into different departments, sub-brands and capabilities that The Mill offers. Through the design of the new site, we have been able to streamline and expand on this information to show the full breadth of our capabilities, not just focusing on specific disciplines or capabilities individually. By grouping these into two categories—work that you can ‘Watch’ or ‘Experience’—we have been able to give an overall view into The Mill as an end-to-end creative production company. We pride ourselves on not only our visual language, but our spirit of invention, our rigorous process, and our engineering and collaborative culture. It was important that this was made clear when users interact with our website.

View the article on Communication Arts.