Studio Project
Creating the extraordinary
The Mill
The Mill is a global creative partner to agencies, production companies and brands. Throughout 30 years of creative leadership, it has constantly adapted to push the potential of emerging technologies. With that in mind, we transformed its online presence to showcase a much broader range of clients, projects and creative capabilities.
Visit website
- Strategy
- User Experience
- Digital Design
- Prototyping
- Motion Design
- Development
The need to adapt
With ever-changing client needs and a broader role in conceiving and producing creative technology projects, The Mill needed to change the conversation around its services and capabilities. Its reputation for advertising production is established worldwide. But its strength in digital, virtual and experience marketing less so. This gave us our brief: Tell the new Mill story in the most accessible and impactful way.
We do more than people think – we need our site to show the full breadth and variety of our creative capabilities and act as more of a sales and marketing tool.”
One Mill
Every great idea has its place at The Mill. Its teams collaborate with partners at any stage of their creative process, so we had to help clients find the right team for their project. We engaged senior stakeholders across time zones to understand what they needed from the site, using this insight to define the way Mill content should be ‘watched’ or ‘experienced’.
The infinite canvas
Our key challenge was to create an immersive and memorable hook to enhance, rather than hinder, the user experience. This led to the core idea at the heart of our response: the infinite canvas. It lets The Mill tell richer, deeper and more immersive stories within a seemingly everlasting user journey. The canvas required new tools and custom development to bring our thinking to life. This ‘live’ approach to building the site, with designers working alongside developers, ensured the concept was crafted just as intended.
Discovery across devices
To aid discovery and fully represent The Mill’s ethos, navigation of the site is fluid, with pauses to allow moments of reflection. We created a rich mobile experience alongside desktop, with design and prototyping time dedicated to optimisation for native mobile behaviours.
Making every detail matter
Motion is a vital aspect of the site. To support the infinite canvas, a system of custom UI components creates an editorial flow, bringing energy, reassurance and a sense of boundlessness to the experience.
Helping The Mill thrive
We’ve seen a huge increase in global traffic and engagement. The Output team worked with us to ensure all content is optimised for search and simple analytics & reporting allows us to be more tuned in to which areas are driving inbound enquiries and new briefs.”
186%
Increase in monthly users, from 31k to 90k
215%
Increase in new users, from 26k to 84k
102k
Sessions, a 144% increase from 42k
-20%
Bounce rate down from 73% to 53%