Westco Eiendom is part of the well-known company Westco with Westco Miljø being the market leader in container rental and waste management.
Westco Eiendom manages approximately 70,000m² of properties, and is the largest owner of the investment company Buøy Invest.
The project began after a colleague completed Westco’s identity redesign, which meant the new logo and color palette were already established before the web design work started. My role in this project was as lead designer for the website.
Before any design work started, we ran a series of workshops with the client to uncover what potential buyers actually need when looking at commercial properties. One insight shaped the whole frontpage concept: a buyer looking for a garage and a buyer looking for a large office space are looking for completely different things, even within the same portfolio. The grid pattern itself was inspired by the grids and lines found in the buildings' own architecture, and it does double duty: repeating each listing multiple times, with a different feature or angle each time, so the same property can speak to different buyer needs at a glance.
From there, I built a style guide to confirm the new palette held up for web use. The red and white combination checked in at 4.91:1 contrast, comfortably passing WCAG requirements for text.
The grid pattern itself started as a sketch on a pink post-it note, then moved into a color-blocked Figma prototype, then a high-fidelity version with real imagery for client review.
We kept the color blocks in the final build as a pre-loader for slower-loading images, doubling as a nice visual effect while browsing.
The client got hands-on access to the prototype to gather feedback internally before development began. One piece of feedback that came directly out of that process: buyers care a lot about location, so a map view was added alongside the list and grid views already in the concept.
Note: Westco's team has since redesigned the frontpage and the original grid concept is no longer live. The screenshots and prototype link here reflect the site as originally designed and launched. This page shows an archived version of the site at the time.
