Image Credit : Photography - Earl Carter
Project Overview
How do you create an online experience that reflects the physical experience of one of Australia’s most prestigious commercial buildings? Our brief for the 101 Collins website was to do just that. In order to give audiences a sense of what it means to be a part of this remarkable high-performing business community, we aimed to use immersive and visually engaging visual content to inspire users. Throughout the rich, layered user experience, we wanted to provide a deep-diving insight into the iconic architecture, the premium service standards and the significant cultural connections of this vibrant business address.
Project Commissioner
AXA Real Estate Investment Managers
Project Creator
Team
Stephen Robertson - Creative Director
Craig Devitt - Managing Director
Charlie Chhay - Senior Account Manager
Fong Yu - Senior Designer
Ten Two – Web Development
Project Brief
As an iconic landmark on the Melbourne skyline, 101 Collins Street is arguably Australia’s pre-eminent workplace community. For over 30 years, it has retained its premium status as a home to some of the city’s most prestigious and high-profile tenants. Despite this obvious commercial success, the building had little more than a logo and basic website before Hundredweight were engaged. We created a holistic brand and communications system with three key objectives. To cement its iconic status as one of the very best commercial buildings in Australia. To promote the technological and architectural advancements of this constantly evolving business address. And to create a unique sense of place with a brand reputation that extends far beyond the bricks and mortar.
The obvious next step for us was therefore to replace the existing outdated website and create a digital experience that gives users a sense of 101 Collins being much more than an office building and what it means to be a part of this remarkable high-performing business community.
Project Innovation/Need
The overall design adopts a different approach to conventional commercial building websites. With an aesthetic more commonly adopted by luxury brands, galleries and boutique hotels, we wanted to create a premium look and feel that accurately reflected the 101 experience. Large-scale, beautifully curated photography and videography are balanced with refined typography and luxurious clear/white space. As users navigate through the site and arrive at each page, they are greeted with a large, ambient video header and title that sets the tone of the physical experience for each area of 101 Collins.
With such a layered experience and some lengthy details within pages, a clean aesthetic was maintained and the length of scrolling was minimised by the considered use of expandable accordions, sliding layers of content and galleries of rotating imagery.
The design is also highly modular and visible grid lines provide structure and flexibility for sections to be manipulated in the back end as new content emerges or updates are made. Dark and light page templates also provide a visual shift and tonal change as users explore different areas of the site.
To maintain the visual consistency of the brand, a digital design library was created with standardised components that can be used across the website, email marketing campaigns, and a future app.
Design Challenge
The design brief was very open-ended. While the 101 Collins brand served as a basis for the overall look and feel, the task was to develop a user-friendly interface that was adaptable, polished, and elegant, without appearing too corporate. Since 2018, 101 Collins has created multiple temporary websites that have become confusing and difficult to navigate and manage. Therefore, a comprehensive online resource was required to consolidate and organise all content.
To simplify the browsing experience and streamline the information hierarchy, content-heavy modules were designed to display history, artwork, and more granular information.
One Hundred and One, a separate editorial section, was created to feature 101 Collins' business and lifestyle magazine content, which posed a significant design challenge. With article types ranging from culture, fashion, sustainability, technology and wellness, auto-scrolling content and flexible typographic templates were utilised to highlight articles of varying lengths and content types.
User Experience
The new website for 101 Collins has been well received by the tenants, who have shown a particular appreciation for the video and extensive editorial content of the One Hundred and One journal. These insightful and thought-provoking business and lifestyle articles were previously only available in print, with the digitally sharable content now extending the journal’s reach to a far wider audience.
The website was launched alongside an 8-month lobby upgrade and has seen a 63% increase in engagement during the first month. As a digital experience, the site now effectively represents the brand's progressive and prestigious positioning and has exceeded expectations in terms of performance and ROI.
Digital - Corporate
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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