We’re definitely getting faster at releasing our marketplace websites. This time, our goal was to release a site for businesses involved in clinical development.

As with all our new ventures, it begins with all the decision makers refining their ideas of the goal of the site, then present it to me with a design brief. What comes across my desk:

1. Develop a new brand identity for our new market
2. Design a website around the approved logo

The creative director, my manager, other related people to the project & myself sit down to talk about visual goals about the logo. This is an opportunity for them to give me a primer in clinical development—the business involved in the manufacturing of drugs. It has nothing to do with the development of clinics, as I’ve initially thought.

I started listing items related to the industry: pills, machinery, blister packs, test tubes, etc. Everyone thought that blister packs are unique to the industry & test tubes have already been used in a previous design. From there, I began sketching ideas & making rough mockups of blister packs:

Here’s a tip: when presenting your ideas, be sure to list your best idea first. Everyone fell in love with the top left idea, but thought it was too heavy. They really just wanted the negative contours of the pills, so we reduced the image down to just the shadows of four blisters. After many revisions, color swatches, emails & meetings, we refined the logo to this:

After legal issues & Google ranking, we had to change the site name to Drugdevcompare.

From the logo, I was to take its color scheme & design a whole website around it. To shorten the time of development, all our sites carry the same layout. Essentially, since we are reskinning old sites, my job is to make it feel different from the others. This time around, our team wanted to have a flat site with a lighter header (compared to labcompare.com & foodtechcompare.com).

I work with an amazing development team. Whatever I mockup & note, they can make it happen on the web, with all the AJAX goodness. They’ve put in long hours translating my ideas into a fully functional site: