Roaring Lion Media

Roaring Lion Media is a full-service creative agency founded by a close friend of mine. We'd worked together on and off for years before this, so when the agency rebranded and the digital side needed to catch up, the conversation was fairly short.

The credit is worth splitting honestly. The logo and the core brand elements were developed externally, by someone else, and they were good. My work started after that, taking a brand that existed mostly as a set of assets and working out how it behaves on a screen.

That's less glamorous than it sounds and it's usually where brands come apart. A colour that sings on a business card can be unreadable as body text. Type that looks confident in a lockup falls over at 16px on a phone. A fair bit of this job was translation, then: deciding how the brand scales, what it does when it has to be functional rather than expressive, and where it ought to hold back.

The other half was the narrative. An agency site has a particular problem, which is that everyone says roughly the same things about themselves. I structured the site so you can follow what Roaring Lion actually does, how they work and why any of it matters, and I gave each service enough room to be understood on its own terms instead of compressing it into a grid of icons.

Then the experience itself: bold, because the brand is, but quick and easy to move through, because a slow agency site quietly undermines the argument it's making.

The best part was how it got made. There's enough history between us that I could push, get pushed back, and step out of the way when the right answer was obviously theirs. That doesn't happen on every project. It's also probably why, when Roaring Lion later brought me in on the Speedy Freight redesign for one of their clients, none of the groundwork had to be laid twice.