Lockrose: Helping their website tell a bigger story

Lockrose had built a strong reputation in the energy sector. I designed a new website that helped them tell a bigger story and reach new markets.

The challenge

Lockrose has built an outstanding reputation delivering project management consultancy for major energy infrastructure projects. They wanted to expand into transport, utilities, and the public sector, but their website wasn’t helping them get there. The problem wasn’t their experience. It was how that experience was being presented.

Their existing website concentrated almost entirely on the energy sector, making it difficult for organisations in other industries to recognise that the same expertise, processes, and skills were directly relevant to their own projects. My job was to create a website that broadened people’s perception of Lockrose without diluting the credibility they’d earned in their specialist field.

My approach

Every business has stories to tell. Even a technical consultancy has a story that explains why it’s different, and that’s where I always begin. Before I think about illustration, layout, or typography, I carry out a content audit and work through the structure of a website to understand the story it needs to tell.

Rather than presenting a catalogue of services, I wanted the Lockrose website to guide visitors through their experience and show how years of delivering complex energy projects can translate into other sectors. Once that journey felt right, I began sketching ideas for a visual language that could communicate those ideas quickly and memorably.

The solution

Illustration became the thread that ties the Lockrose website together. For the home page, I designed a large SVG illustration combining hydro, nuclear, solar, and wind energy into a single landscape. Ambient animations–including rotating turbine blades and a gentle glow around the nuclear power station—add life to their pages without being a distraction.

I wanted to explain Lockrose’s project delivery process in a more engaging way. I created a series of illustrations that show the same scene becoming progressively more complete. It begins with a pencil sketch before evolving into finished artwork. Combined with a tabbed interface and subtle transitions, the illustrations reinforce the idea that successful projects develop through clearly defined stages.

Alongside the illustrations, I redesigned every page, refined the colour palette, and introduced typography with more personality than the generic typeface used previously. Behind the scenes, I developed the site using Eleventy and delivered a content management system that makes it simple for the Lockrose team to update their content.

Behind the design

Every illustration began life as a pencil sketch before I redrew it as scalable vector artwork, animated using SVG and CSS. The project also involved wireframing the user journey, developing the site’s visual language, building reusable Eleventy templates, and creating a flexible content management system that makes the website easy to maintain.

The result

The finished website gives Lockrose a platform which is as polished as the consultancy behind it. Instead of presenting Lockrose as specialists in one niche, it now positions them as experienced project managers whose expertise can naturally transfer into infrastructure, transport and utilities.

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Working with Andy has been a breath of fresh air. He really is very good at what he does and I’m very grateful for the enthusiastic recommendations to work with him. Andy is a joy to work with and our end product has far exceeded our expectations of what we could achieve.

What this project demonstrates

Good website design is about uncovering what makes a business distinctive and expressing that clearly. For Lockrose, that meant helping people see that specialist experience in one sector could be just as valuable in another. Storytelling, illustration, and animation all play a part, but they’re just tools used to tell a bigger story.