Fabrik

What We Did

Site design, site development, copywriting, brand refresh

About the Client

Fabrik is on a mission to take underutilized spaces and transform them into community spaces. Not just co-working – true “third spaces” available for anyone in the community to take advantage of.

The Challenge

As an early stage company, they are constantly testing and refining their assumptions. How does pricing work? Who pays for the service – the community builders? The owner? What are they willing to pay? What are the key benefits that resonate the most?

Fabrik’s team is tech savvy and more than capable of handling site maintenance. They needed a site that was beautiful, built in a way that was flexible, that they could ultimately control.

Designing Atomically

Township helped them build a powerful site using a modular, component-based architecture. Starting in Figma, we adopted an “atomic design” bottoms-up approach. We created flexible components that could be customized and combined to build pages.

For example, we created a component that can be used to represent both locations and communities. Underneath the hood it’s the same component. But it is flexible enough to support multiple data structures and can be visually represented in multiple ways.

Tech Savvy Clients Have Different Needs

Since they wanted to be able to update everything themselves, they had strong opinions on what each component should and should not be able to do. We ended up having many more touch points than most clients need (or want) to make sure the design system we were creating would serve their purposes long-term.

Communicating new ideas is different

The site has to educate a prospective member about a new idea. And educational sales are different – you’re not comparing your offering to your competitors, because there aren’t any. You’re introducing a new type of category to the customer.

There are many implications to this. What do their customers need to know, and in what order? What kind of photography do you use to show people in conversation, in a space that isn’t a co-working space?

We worked with Fabrik to make some educated guesses, but made sure the site was flexible enough to test those hypotheses and adjust. Fabrik can quickly run tests on value propositions, customer segments, benefit statements, etc.

Brand guidelines need to be flexible

Fabrik had worked with a branding firm already and had a set of brand guidelines in place. But once you see your brand reflected in your materials often you discover it needs to be tweaked.

The initial brand guidelines had a bold color palette and big bold round typefaces. But once they saw them reflected on the site it felt too childish. So we made some adjustments to font choices and color palette to better reflect the vibe they were hoping to convey.

It’s important to keep an open mind when starting with brand guidelines. No one is going to see the PDF your agency created, but everyone is going to see the website.