An advisory practice that can't show its clients
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Ainsworth Associates has advised chief executives, family offices, private clubs and cultural institutions out of New York City since Susan Ainsworth founded the practice in 2000. Nine services across thirteen sectors, run by six people.
The problem is the one every discretion-bound firm has: the work that would convince you is the work they can't name. So the site has to prove taste instead, and let the few things they can show carry the weight. I built the mark, the site, the signatures their team sends from, and some of the print and digital work they put in front of their own clients.
I cannot believe how quickly you turned this around. … You’ve taken the odds and ends our client gave us and created something really great.
Vicki ElkinsPresident, Ainsworth AssociatesThe first screen
A photograph you have to go looking for
The picture behind the headline is almost invisible until you move the mouse, and then a soft circle of light follows the pointer across it. A visitor who explores is rewarded, and the firm's taste is demonstrated in the first five seconds instead of claimed in a paragraph.
Scrolling
The work arrives as you go
Two columns of their work drift past each other at different speeds as the page moves, and further down the service photographs fade up one after another, never all at once. It reads as considered, which is the whole argument for hiring them.
What they do
Nine services, each one shown
Advisory, positioning, crisis, experiential marketing, custom publishing. Each is a sentence, not a brochure page, under photographs of the kind of work it produces: a magazine cover, an event under a lit canopy, a briefing in progress.
The client list
Thirteen sectors, no names
“Our work puts the emphasis on our clients, not us.” The sectors they serve are listed over a photograph of a room at night, and the line underneath says references are available on request. It turns the thing they can't do into the thing they're telling you about themselves.
The team
Six people, and who you'd actually get
A prospect choosing an advisory firm is choosing the person who shows up. Every one of the six has a portrait, a title and a bio a click away, so the question of who's doing this work is answered before the first call.
The mark
A wordmark that reads as a practice, not a startup
A high-contrast serif, broken over two lines into the red mark they use most, then set out flat where the full name is needed and cut down to an A over the name for the square their social profiles want. The same letterforms carry a banner photograph without a logo panel in the corner. It has to sit beside a family office and a cultural institution without looking like it wants to disrupt either of them.
Every inbox
One signature, six people
A firm that sells judgment cannot have six different sign-offs going out of six inboxes. I built the signature as HTML each of them pastes in once, so the mark, the spacing and the type are the same whoever is writing, in whichever mail client they happen to use. This is where every message they send lands.
On paper
A fact sheet their client can hand across a table
Two sides of a development deal: the opportunity on the front, the city, the sponsor and the track record on the back. A sheet like this gets read standing up, so the numbers carry it and the prose stays underneath for whoever wants it. Designed for Ainsworth to put in a client's hands, not for a download page.
On paper
An event flyer that has to work at a glance
A reception and panel on what AI means for the next generation. The whole job is the top third: a title somebody reads from across a room, and a ribbon of color doing the work a stock photograph of a lecture hall would have done badly.
For a client of theirs
Forty conferences, one guide you can move around in
Their client needed to decide which conferences to be at across two years. That started as a spreadsheet nobody opened. It is now a guide in three tracks: pick anything out of the index and you land on it, every entry the same shape, with dates, city, speakers, what sponsoring costs and the links to register or apply. The nav follows where you are, and the whole thing prints to PDF for the people who still want paper.
Under the hood
The motion knows when to stop
The spotlight and the drifting columns run only where there's a mouse and room for them. On a phone the page holds still and loads fast.
A contact form that reaches somebody
Messages are checked for bots and delivered by email, with a thank-you page, so an inquiry from somebody's board chair does not sit in a spam folder.
Written to be found
Every page carries its own title and description, built from how people describe what this firm does, not from what the firm calls it internally.
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Your great work deserves to look great.
Twenty-five minutes. Tell me what you're trying to do and who needs to see it, and I'll tell you what I'd build first and roughly what it costs.