Cornish Lithium
Amplifying the brand’s vital importance to UK energy
Website design
Website replatform
Brand identity evolution
Brand guidelines
Cornish Lithium is a pioneering mineral exploration and development company driven by a passion and commitment to exploring for and extracting decarbonising metals in a socially and environmentally responsible way. Cornish Lithium is primarily focused on the extraction of lithium from geothermal waters and hard rock in the historic mining district of Cornwall, leading the way in an industry that will play an essential role in the UK's transition to a lower-carbon economy.
As an innovative, fast-growing and tech-focused company, their website design no longer captured the attention of, nor engaged with visitors, to leave an appropriate brand impression.
Our challenge?
Design & deliver a user experience that reflects the company's origin, values, goals, and mission, whilst unifying the brand’s tone of voice and messaging to engage users and communicate the brands’ story in a more compelling & meaningful way.
Building a partnership
Following success in a competitive pitch, our first job was to immerse ourselves in the brand and the business, including in-depth market research carried out by Stonehaven Global which informed positioning and key messages. Working closely with the communications team, we conducted a program of discovery works from competitor analysis through to crystallising the tone of voice and brand personality.
Our mission
We set out to develop a human-centric website, to combat the rather corporate-feeling nature of their peers, that demonstrates their pride in being a Cornish business, and showcases their hands-on approach to the local community.
An enhanced visual identity for digital
The brand’s visual identity had not been exercised in digital until we brought our fresh, brand-led perspective to the table. The use of colour and typography were a particular focus during our design exploration, extending their palette and font use to better reflect a refreshed brand personality and, combined with image treatment, enabled them to carefully balance looking professional without feeling too corporate.
Brand continuity
A goal of the project team was to ensure a connected brand experience across all channels. Cornish Lithium had various graphics designed for placements on vehicle livery and in social media, for example, which we found ways to integrate into the new design system. We made great use of an existing, contoured map graphic in an interactive ‘hot spot’ component that showcases their active project sites on the frontend, but more impressively, in it’s modular form, enables the client to set locations on the graphic and create variations on this using other graphics or images in the future.
Maximising value
We maximise value by ensuring that our efforts are directed to outputs that the client & consumer will extract the most value from. Our natural inquisitiveness means we seek opportunities to maximise that value.
For example, when presented with the task to redesign Cornish Lithium’s company presentation document, we had noticed there was a presentation style in use widely across the business. So with a desire to improve brand consistency, it was a no-brainer for us to put our expertise to the test and deliver an editable design template based on our new website design that would enable the company presentation document to be improved, while providing the communications team with confidence that the rest of the business could be autonomous and keep all documents properly polished and consistent.
Website engineering
Key Features
Responsive design across mobile, tablet and desktop devices
Content creation, editing, and publishing via Sanity CMS
Real-time content updates and versioning
Modular build for near infinite page layout combinations
SEO for improved search engine ranking
Integration with Google Analytics for tracking user behaviour & conversions
Sanity.io is a great system. A blank, un-opinionated canvas to structure the backend of their website in a way that fits the business structure and makes for an intuitive editor experience for Cornish Lithiums communications team.
With document referencing for team, careers, FAQs, hotspots and other data, it allows an editor to write once and use that data on any page, retaining that all important single point of truth.
Flexible & Performant
Our headless solution combines the super-intuitive Sanity CMS and Gatsby frontend framework producing an easy-to-use CMS for quick content editing, and a frontend that loads quickly for users. Our modular approach to design is flexible and responsive, providing the client with the means to grow the site with near limitless combinations of page layouts and content, keeping it fresh, increasing shelf life and giving visitors variety.