Portico Investment

The story of how I helped Portico Investment promote their property investment consulting business

Portico Investment are a team of property investment consultants who specialise in build-to-rent and shared housing investments. To help them shift their focus from managing investments to investment consultancy, they asked me to redesign and develop their website.

Modern art inspiration

Google “property investment” and you’ll find any number of websites which look identical, with their faded-back city skylines, generic interiors, and smiling people shaking hands over a laptop. That’s not the impression to give when you say you do things differently.

For Portico Investments, I wanted to create a series of abstract graphic illustrations with a strong architectural feel, rectangles, and diagonal facets. I had Picasso’s Cubist work in mind, where his diagonal divisions of rectangles created faceted planes. I was also reminded of some of Mondrian’s work in his De Stijl “style” with its rectangular modules.

So I sketched out my own version, which was a mixture of those influences. Every shape is split diagonally, and that repeated motif creates direction, movement, light, and shadow. When I was happy with the sketch, I colour-blocked it and added outlines.

I made several different graphics, which all share the same underlying grid and intersecting architectural forms.

Website design and prototyping

Of course, designing a website for a business like Portico Investment goes beyond illustration. I adjusted their colour palette to improve how it looks on screen, and replaced their high-contrast typeface with one which looks stylish and is readable at all sizes. I developed a full suite of pages using CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, before packaging everything up to hand over to Portico Investment’s development team who will be developing the website.

The outcomes

• Bespoke design and original illustrations
• SVG animated graphics
• User experience design

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