Hirsch Bedner & Associates
HBA approached Seesaw to unify its global presence. With teams spread across 15 countries and multiple business units, the challenge was to create one website that could speak to local audiences while presenting a clear and cohesive brand identity.
The site needed to balance global consistency with local flexibility, giving each region space to highlight its own projects, news, and people. To achieve this, we had to design advanced filtering systems and dynamic pages that could adapt content to different audiences.
User Journeys
User Experience
Digital Design
Prototyping
Digital Development
Project Management
The new HBA website needed to bring together a wide range of requirements across the business, aligning content and objectives from multiple regions into one cohesive platform. It had to support intuitive ways to explore projects, news, and people through advanced filtering, while also delivering dynamic, localised content that felt relevant in each market.
Performance was equally critical, with the site required to load quickly and reliably anywhere in the world via a global CDN. Alongside the digital strategy, we also developed a content plan to guide photography and video across all locations, ensuring a consistent and considered visual language throughout.
Our Approach
We began by mapping user journeys and defining content hierarchies to balance global brand cohesion with local flexibility. Prototyping and testing ensured the UX could handle both depth and scale, while advanced search and filtering tools were designed to help users quickly find the right projects, news, and people profiles.
On the technical side, the site was built to run globally on a CDN, distributing the load and delivering localised content with speed and reliability. A central content plan guided international photography and video, ensuring visual storytelling remained consistent across all markets.
Dynamic localisation
We introduced dynamic page structures that respond to a user’s location, automatically prioritising content relevant to their region. By geo-locating users, the site subtly adjusts the hierarchy of each page to surface local projects, people, and articles first, while still providing access to the full global portfolio. This approach ensures the experience feels both globally connected and locally relevant, no matter where it’s accessed.
“This project was about more than just building a website, it was about bringing our global studios together under one brand. Seesaw understood the complexity of our business and delivered a platform that feels unified, flexible, and powerful. The results speak for themselves: our website is now the central hub for marketing across all 29 studios, driving engagement and enquiries at a level we’ve never seen before.”
— Elizabeth Gualtieri,
Global Director of Marketing, HBA
Mobile First
With a global audience increasingly engaging on mobile, the experience was designed mobile first from the outset. Navigation, filtering, and dynamic content modules were carefully considered for smaller screens, ensuring the experience remained seamless and intuitive across devices. Content layouts were optimised for readability, speed, and flexibility, balancing rich storytelling with usability. The result is a mobile experience that feels every bit as refined and capable as the desktop site.
Outcomes
The new HBA website has become the central digital platform for the global business, unifying 29 studios under one cohesive online experience while allowing each location to maintain its own voice and visibility. Since launch, site traffic has more than doubled, with enquiries increasing by 36%, demonstrating the platform’s ability to connect audiences with the brand in meaningful ways. More than a website, the platform provides HBA with a scalable digital foundation designed to support continued international growth and evolution.
