Role
Web & Brand Designer

Deliverables
Website design, brand application, accessibility

Designing the website for the Netherlands' national crisis helpline — working within existing brand guidelines and a component library to create something that feels safe, clear, and human.

The situation
Activant Capital is a research-led global investment firm that partners with high-growth founders transforming commerce — fintech, supply chain, and B2B software. Their website needed to evolve alongside the firm: new sections, new ways of presenting their portfolio and research, and new components that the existing design system didn't yet account for.
I came in after the initial design had been established. The visual identity — the navy and electric blue palette, the typographic system, the grid — was already in place. The challenge wasn't to redesign, but to extend: to build new parts of the site that felt like they'd always been there.

The approach
Working within someone else's design language requires a particular kind of discipline. You need to understand the system well enough to make decisions the original designer would recognise — and confident enough to push it where it needs to go. The existing brand had a clear tone: authoritative, clean, research-driven. Every new component had to serve that tone while solving for content and layouts the original system hadn't anticipated.
I designed new page templates, content sections, and UI components that expanded the site's vocabulary without breaking its grammar. The work ranged from structural (new page types for the firm's growing portfolio and research output) to granular (interactive elements, responsive behaviour, content modules that needed to flex across different types of information).

Outcome
Full website design — desktop and mobile. Information architecture and user flows for crisis pathways. Brand application to digital — working within existing guidelines. Extended component library for web-specific patterns. WCAG-compliant design decisions throughout.