Ambius and Rentakil merge
Senior UX Designer
The Challenge
Rentokil has acquired Ambius, two completely different companies, one selling rat poison and the other green plants. Ambius’s website was so outdated but they couldn’t pay for the development costs of a new design. So we have taken the design system from Rentokil and beautified it to be repurposed.
Cleaning up the brand
It is incredible what a little bit of space can do to the look and feel of a website. Ambius is all about looking fresh and providing clean air, so their website needs to portray that same feeling. By increasing the line space between sentences you are not only making it easier for the user to read but also giving that clean space feel.
Accessible green
A website of this scale needs to be accessible to everyone, it might even be a legal requirement one day. I suggested Ambius change their colour palette ever so slightly so it can be readable to all users. This was obviously a big change, it’s not just the website but all branding. A costly change but not being accessible could be even more costly.
White space
I am a broken record when working on a design or presenting to a client when it comes to talking about white space. It’s the holy grail of all the design rules.
Below are a couple of screenshots of how the components have gone from dark and cluttered to light and airy, all with a little more padding, line height and colour adaptions.
I switched up the card design to have the text below the image rather than on top of it, this helps create that clean look and mitigates all issues of accessibility.
Before
After
Work process
I had regular meetings with the clients during the design phase, as I was recommending a lot of change it was important that they were on board and loved the process of watching their brand come to life again.
Our brief was to re-design the Rentokil components, however, when I presented the components with a fresh design the Ambius team couldn’t see the vision of how they would use it. I started to bring the components into page templates with some of their content from the current website, this worked really well and it was so fun to watch them get excited.
The Rentokil development team needed comprehensive notes of how I had changed the components down to each difference in padding, alignment and use. We had regular calls to talk about what was possible and what might need more time.
It did feel like I was juggling two clients, trying to keep everyone happy meant I needed to be really flexible with my approach to the designs and presenting so everyone was engaged.
My thoughts
I had an absolute blast with this challenge!
At first, I was very daunted by Rentokil design system, it was a bit of a mess with no clear organisation. Once I had split it up, deleted any repeated components, audited what was there and created a list of what I needed I could see how it was going to be possible.
The scale of the Ambius website was also daunting, but again I broke it up into categories, audited it and began to bring some wireframes together it became a really fun process.
The Ambius team were over the moon with their new website design, the dev were happy because I had been consistent with my notes and touching base with them throughout the project. The stakeholders were thrilled as I had managed to not work overtime, they were in budget and had an exciting new website to take into development.
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