Agency Website
A ground-up redesign of the Ogilvy Portugal agency website, built to be disruptive by the standards of the time without losing the weight of the brand.
Client
Ogilvy & Mather Portugal
Year
2016
Role
Senior Interactive Designer. Responsible for the full design of the site.
Stack
Web · Motion Design · Animation
Context
Ogilvy Portugal had no real web presence. What existed was a landing page, contacts and nothing more, for one of the most awarded advertising agencies in the country, representing a group of seven specialist agencies under one roof. The work wasn't visible. The people weren't visible. The awards weren't there. A brand built on the idea that advertising should sell sat behind a page that wasn't selling anything.
Problem
The brief was to build a full agency website that matched the ambition of the work inside the building. Disruptive by web standards, that was the explicit ask. The harder part was that disruption couldn't come at the cost of the brand. Ogilvy is one of the most recognisable names in advertising, with a visual identity that carries real institutional weight. Whatever we built had to push against convention and still feel unmistakably like Ogilvy.
For an agency used to doing this for clients, the question was whether we could do it for ourselves.
Approach
The first decision was where to anchor the visual language. David Ogilvy's pipe is one of the most recognisable symbols in advertising. We used it as the entry point, not decoratively but mechanically. The loading sequence opens on the pipe. Smoke rises from it. The smoke transitions into a vertical line. That line then becomes the structural spine of the site and the mechanism by which content enters the screen, pulled upward from the bottom as a page transition. Every page loads the same way. The line is always there.
That line did more than animate. It became the grid. Content sits on one side, context on the other. The split created a consistent reading structure across a site with very different content types, case studies, people profiles, news, clients, without forcing them into the same template.
The navigation was hidden. One hamburger icon, no persistent menu. In 2016 that was still a contested decision on desktop, but it was the right one for this site. Ogilvy's work is visual and dense. A persistent nav bar would have competed with the content. The empty space it left behind was deliberate, less noise, more room for the work to carry the screen.
The People section was built around hierarchy as a genuine design principle. The default state shows the Chairman at the top. Click into any team member and the portrait expands to fill the upper half of the screen, the rest of the team appearing below as a grid. The structure mirrors how the agency actually works. In advertising, hierarchy isn't incidental, it's cultural. The design reflected that rather than flattening it.
Work
The site covers six sections, Quem Somos, Clientes, Casos, Notícias, Recrutamento, and Contactos, with each agency sub-brand given its own space inside Quem Somos. Seven agencies, one surface.
The vertical line as divider runs through the entire site. On the homepage the featured project sits left, title and category right. On interior pages the same split holds, image or visual evidence on one side, copy and context on the other.
The case study index was filterable by discipline: Advertising, Digital, Design, Autopromoção, and Filme. Given the scale of work across a seven-agency group, filtering wasn't optional. It was the only way to make the portfolio navigable without overwhelming the screen.
The Team layout put the most senior person at the top by default.The Team layout put the most senior person at the top by default. Click on any team member and their portrait fills the upper viewport with a bio panel that slides in. It was one of the more involved interactions on the site and one of the more culturally specific. The same structure would have read very differently at a flat-hierarchy tech company.
Outcome
The site replaced a contacts page with a full editorial presence for one of Portugal's largest agency groups. Seven specialist agencies, a client roster that included Audi, Skoda, Super Bock, and Pestana Hotel Group, and a body of award-winning work, none of it had been visible online before this. The launch gave the agency a surface that matched what they'd been producing for years.
The interaction model, the pipe, the line, the upward pull, was distinctive enough that it read as an Ogilvy artefact rather than a generic agency template. That was the brief. It held.
Reflection
Designing for your own agency is a different kind of pressure. There's no client to push back; the standard is internal, and internal standards at a creative agency are high. What made it manageable was having a clear constraint from the start: disruptive, but not at the expense of the brand. The pipe gave us an anchor. Everything else, the line, the split, the hidden nav, followed from that first decision. When the central metaphor is right, the rest of the design tends to resolve.
