CSS is a Vienna-based software company with over 30 years of experience building custom software solutions. Their website no longer reflected who they’d become—a broad, trusted technology partner, hiding behind a site built for a much smaller company.
We were asked to rethink the site from the ground up: structure, visual identity, and content strategy, with room to rebuild the sitemap entirely.
Team
Stefan Pesendorfer (UI Design)
CSS Team (Development)
Anja Frei (Project Management)
The Challenge
The real challenge wasn’t visual—it was informational. Thirty years of expertise and a growing service portfolio needed to feel discoverable, not overwhelming. And the site needed to do something most B2B software sites don’t bother with: make the company feel like people, not just a vendor for technological solutions.
Two problems, tightly linked:
Structural: how do you organize a a large growing library for services and case studies, so decision-makers can actually find what’s relevant to them
Perceptual: how do you communicate deep technical expertise without falling into the cold, corporate tone that CSS specifically didn’t want to be known for?
The Goals
Make the full breadth of CSS’s services discoverable, especially to existing clients who only knew a small part of the business
Reflect CSS’s actual brand values (honesty, long-term partnership, no outsourcing) through both structure and tone
Build a foundation for content and SEO growth, not just a static brochure site
Create a design system that could scale as the company and its content library kept growing
Brand Strategy: Finding the Right Tone
Before we touched any screens, we ran a brand workshop to get underneath what CSS actually stood for—not just what they did, but how they wanted to be perceived. Two archetypes emerged from that session: the Loyalist and the Caregiver. Trust, consistency, and long-term relationships, not disruption or technical bravado.
That became the single biggest design decision of the project.
The obvious move for a software company is the one you’ve seen a hundred times: dark backgrounds, glowing gradients, futuristic type. We deliberately moved away from it. If the brand was about trust and partnership rather than cutting-edge disruption, the visual language needed to say that before a single word of copy did: warm colors, soft shapes, generous whitespace, approachable typography.
Design Exploration
We presented three visual directions, each testing how far the “warm, human” concept could go before it stopped feeling credible to a buyer looking for high tech solutions.
The final direction pulled the strongest element from each: the color palette from concept 1 “Joy”, the typography from concept 2 “Spark”, and the layout and shape language from concept 3 “Root”—the client’s own critique made visible, proof that the "warm but credible" balance wasn’t a single lucky guess, but something arrived at through a real back-and-forth.
Key Design Decisions
People, not just a page
Instead of tucking the team onto a single “About Us” page, we wove them throughout the site: in service pages, case studies, and content sections. If long-term relationships are core to the brand, the people behind the company needed to be visible everywhere a decision-maker might land, not filed away in one corner.
Rebuilding the information architecture
With a growing list of services and case studies, the old structure had become a bottleneck rather than a guide. We rebuilt the sitemap around how decision-makers actually think about their problems, rather than around CSS’s internal structures—making it possible to arrive from any entry point and still discover the full range of what CSS offers.
Developer-inspired details
Small, specific touches nod to CSS’s technical culture without tipping into cliché: lists that start at 0, pixel-referenced typography in select moments (a retro touch fitting a company that’s been building software since 1995), subtle “easter eggs” throughout the site. These aren’t decoration for its own sake—they’re a way of letting the engineering and team culture show through in a brand that otherwise leads with warmth, giving technical visitors something that quietly signals “we get it”.
Responsive by structure, not just by scaling
With a content-heavy, service-rich site, responsive design had to happen at the structural level—how content reflows and re-prioritizes—not just visual scaling. Layouts were designed to hold up as the content library grows, not just for the launch version.
Motion with restraint
Small interactions and animations reinforce the approachable tone throughout the site, without slowing the experience down or working against the trust-first brand positioning. Motion supports the story, it doesn’t perform for its own sake.
Design System
With a large and growing set of services, case studies, and content types, consistency couldn’t rely on one-off decisions—it needed a system. We built a design system around the warm, approachable visual language established during brand strategy: color, type, spacing, and component patterns that could flex across dozens of content types without drifting from the core tone.
The system was built to outlast the launch. It’s still the foundation CSS’s team works from today, and it’s proven flexible enough to extend beyond the website itself.
Collaboration
This was very much a two-designer project. My colleague Steve and I worked closely through the visual exploration and UI phases, exchanging ideas and refining concepts together rather than splitting the work into separate lanes. My focus centered on UX structure, the overall design system, and interaction design, while Steve led motion design—and we shaped the final visual direction together.
Developer handoff was equally collaborative. Questions got resolved quickly, developer feedback shaped small implementation decisions along the way, and the final build stayed close to the design.
Outcome & Impact
The site launched successfully and is still live today. The design system continues to be actively used by CSS’s team, and it’s proven durable enough to extend beyond the website: CSS has carried the same visual language into printed materials and social media.
This project was never about chasing more visibility or new customers—CSS already generated plenty of business through its existing channels. What they wanted was simply a presence that finally looked like the company they’d become. The clearest signal that it worked: the client kept building on the system well past launch, extending it into print and social channels we hadn’t originally designed for.
Reflection
The strongest decision in this project was the choice, early on, to resist the obvious visual language for a software company. It would have been easy to default to dark, technical, “cutting-edge” aesthetics. The brand work made it clear that wasn’t who CSS actually was, and trusting that insight shaped everything that followed.
What made this project work was keeping strategy and craft close together throughout—the archetype work from the brand workshop stayed visible in every UI decision, rather than living in a slide deck that got left behind once design started. That’s also what I’d want to carry into future projects: treating brand and UX strategy as a working input to design decisions, not a formality before the "real work" begins.
The fact that CSS extended the system into print and social, unprompted, is the outcome I’m proudest of. It’s a sign the system did its job—not just as a website, but as a visual language the company could actually live in.
