Corporate website for AkzoNobel
A design system built for storytelling
:quality(80))
AkzoNobel is one of the world's leading paints, coatings and specialty chemicals companies, a business with a rich portfolio of brands and an extraordinary reach. Their products are on the hull of ships navigating Antarctica, on the walls of the Rijksmuseum, on the bodywork of F1 cars. Not many companies can say that. Translating that into a digital presence that did justice to those stories was a significant creative and strategic challenge.
The Challenge
AkzoNobel had never had a unified digital ecosystem. Different brands, different teams, and different agencies had built digital presences independently, resulting in inconsistency and missed opportunities to tell the broader AkzoNobel story. But beyond the structural problem was a deeper one: a brand with genuinely compelling stories to tell was presenting itself like any other industrial company. The task was to fix both.
The Idea
Rather than building another corporate website, we decided to create a stage. AkzoNobel's stories lead — the Antarctic expedition, the F1 livery, the museum restoration. The product is always the hero, but the entry point is the story. For those who want to go deeper, every story connects downward: to the brand behind it, the product that made it possible, the craft and chemistry involved. We called it the journey from surface to depth — from the beauty of the everyday, through storytelling that engages, to successive layers of knowledge about AkzoNobel and its world.
:quality(80))
:quality(80))
To bring the concept to life internally, we also produced a series of short animations shown on screens throughout AkzoNobel's headquarters — an invitation for the organisation itself to see the brand in this new light.
:quality(80))
The Approach
As Creative Lead for all AkzoNobel projects, I was involved from initial proposals through to hands-on design work with the team. The project centred on developing a flexible digital design language that could bring the brand to life and enable AkzoNobel to tell its stories in different ways: from investor communications to product storytelling to brand campaigns.
:quality(80))
:quality(80))
The design language was built into a comprehensive design system: a shared set of components, patterns, and principles that any team, internal or external, could use to create consistent, high-quality digital experiences.
:quality(80))
Result
For the first time, AkzoNobel had a proper digital ecosystem in place: an interconnected set of platforms sharing a coherent identity and a consistent user experience. The design system gave them the tools to scale their digital presence without sacrificing quality or consistency. The corporate website, product subsites, and several brand sites all launched using the new design language — and for the first time, a brand with extraordinary stories to tell had a stage built to tell them.
My role
As Creative Lead for all AkzoNobel projects, I was involved from initial proposals through to hands-on design work with the team.
:quality(80))
:quality(80))
:quality(80))