Helin

Helin is a Miami brokerage founded in 2009, working waterfront only: canal houses in Coconut Grove and Coral Gables, apartments and penthouses in Brickell, Sunny Isles, Bal Harbour and Key Biscayne. Around thirty transactions a year, never more, all of them on Biscayne Bay or the barrier islands.

The brief was fixed on day one: no name change, no new logo, no repositioning. Helin has fifteen years of standing on the bay and no reason to put it back in play. The one weak point was the website, untouched since 2014, heavy, barely usable on a phone, and above all indistinct. Miami luxury real estate presents itself the same way everywhere: a drone shot at sunset, a wide gold serif, the word LUXURY, a rendered infinity pool. The portfolio was worth twelve million, the site said eight hundred thousand.

The whole redesign comes down to a change of hour. Miami is not a city of sunsets, it is a city of high noon: hard white overhead light that cuts clean shadows and turns the water green over the flats. That light is free and nobody uses it, because it is considered difficult.

• Audit of the site and the category: the golden sunset identified as the main competitor, ahead of other brokerages
• Architecture cut back to five pages, with the listing page made the centre of the site rather than the end of the journey
• Art direction: eleven o'clock light, and facts before the view. Dock length, bridge clearance and aspect appear before the first photograph
• A deliberately cold interface, so that all the warmth arrives through photography
• Animation driven by springs rather than easing curves, integrated frame by frame
• Shot list: everything is photographed between ten and noon, without exception