How We Worked Together

The work required close partnership from the start. We collaborated with the Allen Institute's brand and communications team and with Neville Brody's studio throughout. The project touched every part of the organization. Alignment and communication were as much a part of this engagement as the creative work.

With the brand still in development, we had to make considered decisions about how it would behave in contexts not yet addressed: how the typography scaled across devices, how the lens icon functioned with motion and on screen, how the color palette harmonized and performed across the web system, and how every element held up against accessibility requirements.

Extending a brand in progress to digital at this scale requires judgment, and it requires knowing the organization well enough to make calls the client can trust.

An Online Experience Worthy of the Institute's Work

The new visual identity was editorial, bold, and energetic, which needed to be translated across the entire site experience. The Allen Institute's research is by humans for humans, which came to life with photographs of people alongside a color palette directly inspired by the scientific imagery itself.

Full-bleed, high-resolution imagery commands attention. Page layouts are clean and uncluttered, with drama and meaning embedded through scale and the relationship between word, image, and space rather than through decorative movement or visual noise.

Webflow Enterprise Design System

In research-oriented environments, imagery and headlines scale down to support an informational tone. In feature-style contexts, iconic imagery and generous white space create editorialized narratives. In the most expressive spaces, simplified messaging, scaled headlines, and bold color create impact.

The information architecture routes general visitors toward the accelerator landing pages on the main site, and scientists toward the separate Accelerator sites for deeper science, without making that transition feel like a departure. Every decision was made in service of storytelling that people would remember.

The Webflow Enterprise build covers the full breadth of what the Institute publishes — research stories, staff profiles for over 1,100 people, educational resources, tutorials for science educators, more than 800 publications, events, and a podcast. Each content type was structured so the relevant team could manage it independently, and a building blocks component system means new pages can be launched without starting from scratch. The result is an ecosystem where more staff contribute, including external collaborators from the scientific community, without creating a bottleneck for the core team.

Results and Impact

AllenInstitute.org launched alongside the public rebrand and is now the primary digital face of one of the world's leading scientific research organizations. For most of the Institute's audience, it is where the new brand identity becomes real. The communications team has a Webflow CMS they can operate across departments with significantly less time and effort than before. The news section has the visual scale it needs to tell science stories with the weight they deserve. And the full breadth of the Institute's work, its research, its people, its educational resources, its publications, and its accelerator programs, sits within a structure that reads as one organization with one purpose.

If you're working on a brand or website project where the stakes are high and the timeline doesn't move, we'd like to hear about it. Get in touch here.