KOHN PEDERSEN FOX (KPF)

Building an Award-Winning Presence for an International Architecture Firm

Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) is a leading international architecture firm with more than 600 staff in offices around the world.

Their projects span the globe and sectors, including Hudson Yards in New York, the World Bank Headquarters in DC, South Korea's Rodin Museum, Univelver London, and many more.  They needed a digital presence that could successfully convey the elegance and scale of their work while being powered by a platform that enabled them to easily and attractively detail and promote new projects.

NMC Partnered with our good friends at Franklyn who led the design portion of the project while we led the frontend and platform development.  To give KPF more complete, creative control over the pages on the site and create beautiful new templates, NMC selected Craft CMS as the platform for the project.  The site has been a resounding success for the brand and was a Webby Honoree in the best practice category. 

Areas of Expertise

  • B2B
  • Professional Services

Services

  • Website Development
Visit the Site

Exuding Elegance and Excellence

KPF plans and designs some of the most beautiful structures in the world, so it was essential for their new website to project the same level of quality and elegance both in terms of design and user-experience. We kept this in mind throughout the site build while paying special attention to creating a site that would be managaable and scalable over time.

 

Crafting an Efficient Online Hub

The site leans on high quality images that help immerse the visitor in the business and aristry of KPF. With the site serving visitors around the world, it was essential that even these high resolution images loaded quickly. NMC took care to build the site with best practices in mind to make sure that the site would be optimized for different devices, internet connections, and accessibility standards.

Additionally, it was important that KPF could continue to build within the established framework; the firm is prodigious and needs to be able to highlight their latest work as capably and beautifully as the first projects on the site. NMC constructed the Craft setup with a series of blocks that lets KPF easily assemble pages with text and images, including unique elements that break out of the grid or have interactivity. KPF not only launched a beautiful site but was setup to be able to easily grow it on their own.

Building a Narrative

Every project has a story, and a goal from the very beginning of this project was to use the web to engagingly share those stories and project details with visitors.  A Stories section was built out with a focus on longform content, allowing KPF to build long, beautiful pages that are image-rich and tell the story of a specific project and how it potentially fits into their own history or the history of architecture at large.  The Stories feature takes advantage of their great media assets, strong writing team, and flexible technoloy.

Additionally, each Project is setup to clearly lay out the most important elements, highlight beautiful imagery, and serve as a hub to quickly allow visitors to reach other related projects or industries.  The Project pages succeed in highlighting the uniqueness of each building while also clearly identifying how it fits into the broader scale of KPF's work and giving visitors quick access to that content. 

Always Iterating

Since launching the site in 2016, NMC has worked closely with Franklyn and KPF to continue iterating and improving on the design and infrastructure of the site.  With its solid foundation on Craft, the updated design elements, code enhancements, and new features have all been built on the original CMS with no content revisiting necessary.  The site continues to represent the firm well, adjusting well to new standards on the web and representing KPF as a leader in the industry.