We played archaeologist on 250+ pages before designing anything.
The first job was excavation. We dug through a site that had been quietly accumulating since around the time the first Avengers movie was in theaters, found the pages nobody had linked to in years, and cleared out the digital dust and cobwebs. What came out the other side was a sitemap a human could actually follow. The Frankenstein finally got a logical skeleton.
Four visual universes, a dated turquoise, and the long road to 3D.
We opened design with moodboards, presenting four distinct visual "universes" for the new site. SDI picked a direction, and our first real move was rescuing the color palette, evolving a tired turquoise into a clean, authoritative blue.
Then came the escalation. The client leaned toward safe stock photography. We politely said we could do better. We walked them from flat vector illustrations to isometric graphics and finally to a full 3D visual language, with a custom graphic for every single service and industry. They were hooked.
Our best homepage concept ran like a potato. So we killed it.
The first homepage concept was ambitious: a full-screen, scroll-jacking sculpture, a massive 3D serpent born from SDI's own logo. In Figma it was stunning. On a staging server it had the performance of a potato.
SDI needed a fast, scalable website more than they needed the flex, so we made the call and scrapped it. Our design team rebuilt the identity around thematic 3D illustrations, a "city of the future" among them, that delivered the premium feel without the performance cost. Double the design work. Still the right call.
18 layouts, so 9 services and 8 industries stopped being 17 one-offs.
We built a scalable system of 18 unique page layouts, including one master template covering all 9 service pages and another covering the 8 industry pages. Every service and every industry got its own custom 3D graphic and visual identity, without leaving 17 separate builds behind for someone to maintain.
450+ CMS items cleaned by hand, and 15 HubSpot forms with more logic than a prestige drama.
Then the unglamorous half. 450+ blog posts, news items, and case studies had to come out of WordPress, and the export file was a mess of competing formats left behind by a graveyard of old plugins. Our project manager, armed with a giant spreadsheet and a concerning volume of coffee, cleaned every. single. entry. by hand. It was a data exorcism.
The forms were their own boss fight. SDI ran about 15 unique HubSpot forms, some with branching logic deep enough to need a recap episode. Webflow's native forms are, let's say, cute. So we custom-coded them to talk to HubSpot properly. For the final one we embedded it straight from HubSpot: one small, well-behaved monster in an otherwise pristine castle.
One developer, six months, and a full Webflow education on the way out.
A fun constraint: Webflow's standard plan is a one-person show, and the Enterprise plan wasn't on the table. One developer on a site this size is like sending one person to build the pyramids. Ours effectively lived in the matrix for six months, and the site shipped.
Near the end, the brief grew. SDI wanted to build new pages from scratch, on their own. So we became their Jedi masters: a full library of reusable components, custom "How to Webflow" documentation, and a series of recorded video tutorials. They got a development education handed over with the website.
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