Rebranding the Welcome — Katharine Graham

Overview

By spring 2026, fifty years into the client services world, the firm was ready for a new welcome. The history mattered, but the site still read as an institutional explanation rather than an invitation to the people and experiences behind it.

The opportunity was not to invent a new firm. It was to make the firm already there visible: the warmth of the relationships, the breadth of the work, and the judgment behind every engagement. The redesign needed to welcome the next chapter without losing the credibility of the last five decades.

The original Synergetics homepage compared with Argon and Company, annotated with the research findings that followed

Auditing the
landscape

The audit began with competitors, looking closely at the entry points and how the firms framed their expertise. For a long-standing firm, the first impression needed to make its own position clear.

I ran the same comparative pass across a broader set of consulting firms. By the end of the audit, I had a clear picture of where the category expected a convention and where the firm could break one on purpose to make the welcome feel different.

The discovery findings

The leadership interviews, mapped against the audit, converged on one strategic direction: the welcome needed to grow more personal, more specific, and more clearly aimed at the people on the other side of the screen.

Show, don’t tell.

The work speaks for itself. The site should carry evidence, not claims.

Navigation in both directions.

Industries and offerings need to connect, so the visitor can follow either path through the work.

Personalization in the texture.

The firm has always personalized the engagement. The site should carry that same care.

History is a thread not a page.

Fifty years of relationships belongs woven into the evidence, not in a timeline.

Open the door wider.

Welcome the next decade of clients without closing the door on those who have been here for years.

Warmth differentiates.

Put the people, personal care, and trust in the source material.

Prototype before powerpoint

I made the work visible in a prototype instead of a deck. Four directions, built from the same story, each at a different weight of change. Shown together, the four made it possible to talk about how far the welcome should shift and what each shift would cost.

Light | Inspo AlignmentThe current direction executed well with a warm video hero and a dynamic bento board highlighting history at a glance. This keeps the competitive landscape familiarity while modernizing tone and feel.

Medium | Heat Map NavigationA two-axis grid mapping offerings against industries where when hovering over any intersection you can quickly pull up the case studies behind it. This meets users exactly with the ingredients they need.

Heavy | Personalized ExplorationA guided entry instead of a search box where picking your industry with context pulls up only the case work that answers your situation. This mirrors their referral conversations “get to know you” process.

Wild | Back to the ConvosThe whole site behaves like a conversation and opens by saying hello. Everything mirrors how they would talk to clients to highlight their main differentiators: who they are as people and how they show up authentically.

The site map showing home, who we support, how we help, our work, insights, and who we are, with the pages beneath each

Building the
foundations

The final build drew on all four directions. The structural moves came from the architecture, the voice and texture from the lighter direction, with a clear design system supporting the whole experience.

For the wireframes I annotated every section with the rationale behind it. While some of the process is invisible, each page has a clear job: guide people through the work and keep the firm’s warmth alive.