Building Ventilation Services
Homepage redesign, self-initiated. An experiment in what my current process would do differently.
Self-initiatedArt directionBrandUX/UI2026
Client
Building Ventilation Services Ltd, a real, paying client
Status
Self-initiated concept. Not commissioned, not live.
Scope
Homepage only
BVS is a real client. I built and shipped their current site last year, and it genuinely improved things for them. This is a different exercise: taking the same brand and audience, and asking what I’d do now that I look at research, insight and creative direction before I touch layout.
01
Understand
The original brief
A site that loaded fast, ranked, and spoke to the people who actually commission ventilation work.
Mobile PageSpeed: 56 → 98
Desktop PageSpeed: 69 → 100
Enquiries up 75%, bounce rate down 21%
Structure and copy built around real service lines
Facilities managers, estates teams and M&E consultants, not a general audience.
Where it stopped short
The technical foundation held up and the messaging was correctly targeted. What it never got was a strong point of view. The layout was competent and safe: the kind of clean, generic structure that most AI website builders would also produce, because nothing in it was designed to be unmistakably BVS.
The technical work was sound. The creative direction wasn’t.
02
Direction
What UK ventilation and M&E contractor sites actually look like.
I looked across the category BVS competes in: plant photography on white backgrounds, the same engineering-blue palette, badge walls, and near-identical page structures. Most of it is interchangeable: swap the logo and you couldn’t tell one contractor from another. Competent, and completely forgettable.
Four directions
Rather than jump straight to layout, I moodboarded four substantially different takes on what BVS could feel like, each testing a different relationship between the brand and the buildings it works in.
01 · Manufacturing, critical infrastructure. Technical documentation and industrial brand systems.
02 · Complex problem, guided simplicity. Wayfinding and transit signage as the model for clarity.
03 · No drama. Raw, unstyled industrial photography, plant and pipework as found.
04 · “BVS does its job so everyone else can carry on doing theirs.” Soft, ambient, hospitality-led. BVS as invisible infrastructure.
The one that stuck
Concept four. Not because it was the most decorated, but because the logic behind it matched what BVS actually does: keep buildings running well enough that nobody inside them has to think about it.
“Above deck, life continues.”
The working rationale I wrote against this board: long exposure and slow shutter, people blurred through movement, architecture staying relatively stable, natural atmospheric light, wide compositions with room to breathe, a sense of continuous flow, and BVS itself largely invisible in the frame. The buildings and the people in them carry the story. BVS is the reason it’s able to continue, not the subject of the photograph.
BVS’s entire business is one thing: keeping air moving, in buildings that never stop running.
That’s a stronger identity than another photo of ductwork. The direction became movement itself, air, people and places in motion, instead of static equipment shots.
What changed
- Editorial black-and-white photography built around motion, not stock plant shots
- A bolder, condensed display typeface for pace and authority
- A tightened, more contemporary version of the BVS mark
- A dark, premium palette with one sharp accent, not engineering-blue everywhere
- A situation-led entry point: visitors start from what’s wrong, not a service menu
03
Build
Homepage only. The point was to prove the direction under real content and a real brand, not to rebuild the full site speculatively.
Keeping air moving, made literal: the same motion blur used for the crowd in the hero carries through to the plant itself.
Real environments, shown editorially
The client roster is genuinely strong: NHS trusts, Disney, Marriott, Waitrose, Westfield. The original site listed them as logos. Here they’re shown as the buildings BVS actually keeps running, photographed the same way as the rest of the site, from the O2’s roof canopy down to the individual sites where the work happened.
Start from what’s wrong
Facilities managers don’t arrive knowing they need “AHU refurbishment.” They arrive knowing something’s wrong: a fan’s failing, a room’s too hot, a system’s reaching end of life. The hero is built around that. Click the underlined phrase, pick the situation that matches from the list, and it takes you straight to the relevant information, meeting people in the mindset they actually showed up in, instead of asking them to translate their problem into a service name first.
Screen recording of the situation-finder in the redesigned BVS hero: clicking the underlined phrase opens a list of problems to choose from, which jumps straight to the relevant information
Photography direction
The full homepage, top to bottom, and the reference photography I used to test how far the blur and motion could go before it stopped reading as BVS’s own plant and started looking like generic stock.
The full homepage. Scroll inside the frame to see it top to bottom.
Reference photography
04
Reflect
BVS didn’t ask for this and hasn’t seen it. It exists to show the gap between delivering a site that performs and delivering one with a real point of view, and what closing that gap actually looks like when I apply my current process to work I’ve already shipped.
If it ever became real, that’s a conversation for BVS to have with me, not a roadmap I’m building towards on my own.
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