Bentham Instruments

Manufacturing, Design, Logo evolution, UX, Development

Strategy & Planning

When Bentham approached us, their website was over 10 years old and in need of modernisation. However, simply adding a visual layer would have neglected the opportunity to develop a marketing strategy to communicate Bentham’s unique selling points.

We kicked off the project with our ‘Strategic Content Profiling’ workshop. Here we started to tease out the USPs that the old website wasn’t communicating. Bentham found this challenging but welcomed the opportunity to step out of their comfort zone and think about the business as a whole.

Another key point was that a large proportion of business was being generated by original equipment manufacturers. However, this audience was not being catered to.

Brand Strategy

An important request from Bentham was to look at the brand as a whole. We quickly identified key messages that we wanted to become part of the fabric of Bentham. For example the idea that there is a certain expectation from using Bentham instruments and service - almost a ‘gold’ standard. This quickly became ‘The Bentham Standard’ - something to qualify messages with.

Content Design

One of the issues with scientific instrumentation is the sheer amount of content and data associated with it. Some customers are happy to get an overview of a product and contact Bentham to talk further. Others want to analyse the differences between the products themselves. 

To help with this, each product has a clear ‘overview’ section with a strong call to action. However, a huge amount of content can be further explored by clicking further into the product’s page.

We also accommodated customers who weren’t sure what they needed by creating an applications area that served to highlight use cases. Each of these has links into the relevant products and creates a different way to browse.

A knowledge area was created to highlight Bentham’s involvement in the industry and show their expertise. This includes links to academic citations that use Bentham’s instruments.

Brand design - Revolution or Evolution?

Although open to pushing Bentham’s visual brand identity, we were conscious of the problems with throwing out years of brand equity in the name of modernisation. A series of mood boards were created that allowed us to challenge how far the visual identity could be pushed.

Using this as a yardstick, we were able to offer a modernised, cleaner version of the logo as well as identity guidelines to create consistency between off and online material.

We refined the existing colour pallet to make it easier on the eye as well extending it to add new colours for variation and different use cases.

As well as the usual brand identity guidelines such as logo usage, colour and typography we also created a visual device to highlight “The Bentham Standard” that can be used as a mark of quality.


Development & Optimisation

The website is entirely editable using the enterprise level CMS, Typo3. It’s important that Bentham can easily update content without the need to keep asking us for help. This is especially true with a website that showcases 100s of different products and includes such a large knowledge area.

All the content and products can be easily found using a powerful search engine and easy to use categorisation system.

Website performance is really important to us. By using clean, semantic and fast loading code, the website is well optimised for search engines and to improve the load times for users. The website currently scores 97 out of 100 on Google’s page speed insights. Google's own ‘about’ page only scores 85!

The Result

We’ve been able to create a strong identity for Bentham, modernising their brand while keeping aspects that made Bentham so successful in the first place. The website’s design is clean and easy to navigate, packing a huge amount of content into easily digestible pages that give just the right amount of information for different user types.

Overall, the website sets Bentham apart from their competitors and we look forward to working with Bentham in the future to add new features and continually evolve their site.