Ravensbourne & Sons: fifty years of local record, set like a broadsheet
Concept build. Ravensbourne & Sons is an invented firm. This was made to show how we approach a property brief, so nothing here is a client result and no figure describes a real business.
The brief we set ourselves
A four-partner commercial agency with chartered surveyors under the same roof, trading on the same street since 1974. The firms in this bracket usually get one of two sites: a template with stock photography of a handshake, or a decade-old export from software that no longer exists.
Neither reflects what the business actually sells, which is judgement built up over fifty years on the same half-mile.
What we built
A broadsheet masthead rather than a hero. The firm's name is set large in Cambria over a ruled establishment line, and beneath it a three-column block carries the lede, the live instruction count, and the key facts. The photograph sits below as a band, not behind the type, because type over a picture always costs legibility and this firm has nothing to hide behind.
No cards. No rounded corners. No shadows anywhere in the stylesheet. The whole page is built from rules and hairlines, which is how a document that expects to be trusted has looked for two hundred years.
The availability board
Current instructions are shown on a split-flap board, the kind that used to hang in a railway station. Characters flip in on load, and filtering by To Let, For Sale or Under Offer re-flips only the rows that change.
It earns its place: an agency's stock is the thing a visitor came for, it changes constantly, and a mechanical board says "this is current" in a way a static table cannot. Under reduced-motion settings it simply sets the final text.
Details that did the work
- One accent colour, oxblood, used for the establishment line and nothing decorative
- Instruction figures in tabular numerals so columns align down the board
- Survey enquiry form asks the purpose of the survey first, because that determines the fee
- Fee transparency table, published rather than "on application"
- Every character on the board carries a screen-reader label, since flap fields are meaningless read letter by letter
Where it stands
Audited at 90 out of 100 across usability, uniqueness, beauty and freedom from generic AI patterns. The known weakness is the board on narrow screens: it scrolls horizontally rather than restacking into ruled blocks, which is the first thing a second pass would fix.