Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF)

Discovery: Defining Where KPF Was Headed

We began with a comprehensive discovery process, working with KPF’s leadership and internal stakeholders to understand how the firm had evolved and where it wanted to go. Part of that work was looking back. We traced the KPF website from 1999 to the present, which showed how the site had grown more visual over the years while keeping much the same underlying structure. That history made clear what needed to change: the site had to move past the perception of KPF as primarily a tower firm and show the breadth, thinking, and craft behind its work.

Several clear goals came out of those conversations. KPF wanted its core values to act as organizing principles throughout the site, not just as language on an about page. Project pages needed to become active stories that explained how a problem was solved, and the firm wanted to stand out for its use of video and interactive storytelling. From there, we developed two distinct creative directions, which we called “Soft Elegance” and “Urban Polish,” using mood boards and design exploration to help the KPF team react to different visual languages before we committed to a final design.

Each pillar is an interactive tile that pairs a large image with a featured project, an in-depth story, and a piece of press tied to that idea. This gives visitors a much clearer sense of what sets KPF apart, while still putting the work itself front and center. The homepage now carries far more featured content than the previous site, but the restrained layout keeps it focused, and a Specialty Expertise section on sustainability, technology, and community rounds out the story.

Streamlined Navigation and Smarter Search

The new navigation embraces a thoughtful restraint that KPF appreciated. The header offers only Projects, People, and the KPF 50 anniversary hub, with a menu that opens to the rest of the site. The goal is simple: get visitors to the work and to the people doing it. On the projects page, visitors can browse by project type or narrow the full portfolio by type and location to find the work most relevant to them.

We also integrated Typesense to make site search much richer. Search opens in a side panel with live results as visitors type, and KPF can feature popular searches based on how the site is actually being used, or highlight specific work at certain times of the year. Features like typo tolerance make sure the right results show up even when a visitor misspells a project name, which matters on a site with hundreds of projects around the world. We have written more about this approach in our guide to dynamic website search.

Project Pages That Come Alive

The project pages are where KPF’s work really comes to life. Within WordPress, we built a full suite of custom blocks with interactive effects already built in. Ambient videos expand into full features, animations show buildings taking shape, scroll-triggered sequences reveal images and statistics, and some sections take over the scroll to move visitors horizontally through a project. KPF’s team simply adds their media, even static images, and the blocks handle the motion. The Edge project page is a good example of how these pieces come together to tell a project’s story.

We also rethought how projects are tiered. KPF’s previous site included short “baseball card” write-ups for projects that did not yet have the photography or media to support a full page. Since so many projects now have those assets, we built a system where a project can graduate from a simple page into a richer, more interactive experience as new materials become available. Older projects still live in a complete, browsable list, so nothing is lost.

A Storytelling System Across the Firm

The same blocks that power project pages help KPF build rich experiences throughout the site. In-depth stories, Perspectives videos, and essays on where the industry is heading all use the same toolkit, as do the pages for each of KPF’s pillars and specialty areas. This lets the firm share its professional point of view in the same immersive format as its built work, which was one of the clearest goals from discovery.

People pages got the same attention. As KPF’s leaders are interviewed more often and create more video and editorial content, each person’s page can pull in videos, articles, and featured projects alongside their bio. For a firm whose expertise lives in its people, this makes the team as visible as the buildings. The KPF 50 anniversary hub, which brings together history, video, and stories from five decades of work, shows how flexible the system has become.

Built for Performance on WordPress

Interactive effects can come at the cost of speed, so we built the site on WordPress with performance in mind from the start. Images and video are optimized so pages load quickly for visitors around the world, and the motion is layered on top of clean, well-structured content. That gives KPF confidence that the site works well across devices and connection speeds, and that search engines and AI tools can read and understand the firm’s work just as easily as people can.

Our web development approach also keeps the site easy to manage. KPF’s team can build new pages from the block library without developer help, and the tiered project system means the site will keep getting richer as the firm continues to create new work.