Last week in the studio (CW20-26)

In this regular “Last week in the studio” series, I write about what I worked on during the previous week. Last week was spent on a more business-focused but no less creative project

Week 20, 2026: Aurus

My work weeks often vary between projects where my goal is to bring a brand identity to life or reflect a person’s personality with a design, and ones which are more business-focused. Last week was the latter.

A couple of months ago, property developers Aurus hired me to design a website for their Impact Capital initiative. They already had visual identity guidelines and printed collateral, so my design had to follow their direction. Nevertheless, there were still opportunities for me to work with data visualisations to reduce the written copy and make the information more glanceable.

Aurus then came back to me for a redesign of their other website. Again, they had similar visual identity guidelines and printed collateral. This time, I used one of their alternative hues to distinguish the two designs. This website includes twice as much copy as before, so I needed to use layout and typographic hierarchy to avoid it feeling overwhelming.

Websites like Aurus’ often contain interesting facts and figures, and I like to make them features in my design. In this case, I decided to heavily style their development projects portfolio using iconography and large numerals.

Then, I made simpler versions for small screens and to include elsewhere on their website,

Although developing this website will be someone else’s responsibility, I still wrote CSS and HTML and worked in Eleventy to produce a prototype, which should be ninety-odd per cent towards the final development. When I hand the files over to their developers next week, they can choose to stick with Eleventy or use my templates to create a custom WordPress theme.