A New Fat Pencil Website

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Until recently, when you typed “fatpencilstudio.com" into a web browser, it took you to a website that was designed in 2012—in other words, a very, very long time ago. Only six years have passed, but the world was notably different back then. Our current president was still hosting “The Apprentice,” the Mayan Calendar was about to end, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher and Lou Reed were all still alive, and the iPhone 3 was state-of-the-art. Fat Pencil Studio was also different back then, and our website reflected that. Recognizing how much we’d changed, we decided to create a completely new online story of what Fat Pencil Studio has become, namely a legal services design firm focused on visual case strategy. We’re happy to announce the result of all that hard work: the brand-new fatpencilstudio.com!

The task of creating a new website was not only a great chance to reacquaint ourselves with old posts and projects, but also an opportunity to give ourselves a taste of our own medicine in the form of a rigorous design thinking process. I started out by leading our team through an ideation workshop that included exercises aimed at identifying our key messages, and in-depth discussion about the needs and priorities of our audience(s). We then looked at this information through the lens of persuasive storytelling in order to organize the narrative in a way that we hoped would be relevant and meaningful to our clients. Our vision was further refined by working with developer Paul Souders of Scrubjay Works to come up with a flexible and robust site architecture. Countless hours of staff time was spent converting, updating, and creating new content.

The biggest change to the site is its focus on what has become our primary work: visual storytelling for legal professionals. We made an effort to define terms that might otherwise seem vague (What is a “visual story”? A “visual strategy”? A “visual expert”?) And we now have pages devoted to showcasing our approach to specific types of cases, including Construction Law, Personal Injury, Criminal Law, Civil Rights, and Corporate Litigation. (We still love the work we do for non-lawyers, too!)

We hope you’ll take a look, and find something of interest to you.

Ady Leverette was a designer and a principal at Fat Pencil Studio between 2011 and 2018.