How Do You Express an Intangible Service on a Website? — Five Approaches From Architecture, Law, and Real Estate Tech

Consulting, law, architectural design, investment, cloud services — these intangible offerings can’t be picked up and examined firsthand. Visitors to a website have no choice but to imagine their value from indirect cues: words, photographs, motion.
Because of this, simply listing services and track record accurately doesn’t always convey what sets a company apart, or why someone should choose it. More often than not, adding more information only buries what makes it distinctive.

What matters more than exhausting every explanation is deciding what to show so that the value of this service comes across. The answer changes depending on the nature of the service, and on who is choosing it and in what situation. In the five cases below, we each show something different.

An architecture firm’s website can convey its track record simply by lining up finished buildings. But the work alone rarely reveals the thinking behind how the firm approaches architecture. The more beautiful the photographs, the more the site risks being read as a catalog of finished products.

For the corporate site of SUPPOSE DESIGN OFFICE, led by Makoto Tanijiri and Ai Yoshida, we began with months of conversation, working through the shape of their day-to-day practice. What emerged was that the firm’s work is always, at its core, about connecting one thing to another.

・Connect place and movement to create a situation
・Connect constraints and ideas to create value
・Connect architecture and the world to create scenery
・Connect people and people to create chemistry

The phrase that tied these four together was the concept of a “unity made of fragments.” Different elements, each still itself, come together into a single building or a single scene. We believed that process was what made this firm distinctly itself.

Showing the Flow of Thought With “+” and “=”

On the website, we connected the elements that make up each project with a “+,” and expressed what emerges from them with a “=.” These two symbols run through the site as a recurring design accent.
We kept the site’s structure simple, so that the projects and the firm itself stay at the center of attention. The architectural photography is sized to read large on any device.
Show not only the finished work, but the thinking behind it. For SUPPOSE DESIGN OFFICE, we built the firm’s own way of working into the website as the very thing that makes it who they are.

A law firm’s website can hold a great deal of information — areas of expertise, career history, track record. But with an intangible service like law, who you’d be consulting is also a major factor in the decision.

Isshiki & Partners is a firm founded jointly by Taro Isshiki, a US-qualified attorney, and Kazuro Isshiki, a Japanese attorney. Each has spent more than a decade focused on international dispute cases. Founding the firm was a new start, taken on with real resolve. For the branding and website, the theme was how to convey this new chapter.

“Two voices. Two hands. Two expressions. Two stances.” Convey it through the people who provide the service.

The people providing the service are treated as a key element of the website itself.

Facilo is a cloud service that supports real estate brokerage work. For the special site marking its Series B funding round, one theme was conveying not just what the product does, but how Facilo has been received within the real estate industry.
The concept was “a special site that edits together gratitude toward the real estate industry and where the company stands today, to paint a picture of what’s ahead.” We aimed to give shape to that gratitude and to the company’s vision, for both the real estate industry and investors.
At the center of it, we placed the voices of 100 brokerage firms. Alongside those voices, the special site also holds a conversation with investors and content tracing Facilo’s past and what lies ahead. We produced the photography, video, and writing together with outside partners, weaving data and story together.

Rather than speaking only in the company’s own words, we let the users’ own words show who Facilo has changed, and how.

Its position in the market — something hard to capture through features alone — takes concrete shape through the voices of the people who use it.

W4Partners is an industry growth platform for digital companies. Connecting companies to one another and supporting their growth is a service that’s hard to express through photography alone, so on the website, we expressed the idea held in the symbol mark — companies gathering together to form a brilliance, a crystal — as a logo animation.

Turning the Idea Behind the Symbol Mark Into a Logo Animation

On the website, we expressed the idea held in the symbol mark — companies gathering together to form a brilliance, a crystal — as a logo animation. Multiple companies come together, becoming one, to create value. The movement of the logo shows that coming-together.
W4Partners works from the conviction that “digital is a convenient tool for making people happy — we want to deliver the benefits of digital to every corner of Japan,” aiming to connect thousands of companies and generate new innovation. The logo animation expresses that idea of “connecting” at the heart of the business.
Translate the relationships and value a service creates into a single symbol. Through the logo and its motion, the thinking behind the business comes across intuitively.

Yamauchi No.10 Family Office is an organization that aims to contribute to society through asset management and investment activity. Rather than walking through its business one line at a time, the website starts from the history and values passed down as the founding family of Nintendo, and centers on a declaration of intent for the activity ahead.

We expressed that thinking through a story that unfolds like a road movie, in a world that evokes a video game screen.
・Challenge
・Originality
・Playfulness
We built these values into an experience that includes copy, animation, and sound.

Building on Two Axes: Words and Playfulness

In production, we put our effort into two things.
1. Powerful words: developing copy that speaks, in the firm’s own voice, of the spirit passed down and the mission ahead, as a genuine declaration of intent
2. Embodying playfulness and a spirit of challenge: combining a video-game-like world, a story-driven progression, and music that builds excitement
To build a game-like world, we created more than 270 kinds of objects and developed dedicated modeling and placement tools. The same world can be experienced on both PC and smartphone.
The site has also been recognized internationally, receiving a D&AD Awards 2021 Wood Pencil, a One Show 2021 Merit, an NY ADC 2021 Bronze, and Awwwards Site of the Day, among others.
Rather than explaining each business one at a time, build the whole from the question of why this organization exists. This is a case where the values behind the business were conveyed as a single, unified world.

In these five cases, what's shown is different every time.
With an intangible service, what matters isn't adding more information to explain it — it's figuring out what to show so the value comes through. The answer changes what kind of expression the work actually needs.

Showing the thinking behind the work. Showing the people. Gathering the voices of the people who use it. Building a worldview out of a symbol or a set of values. Through five different approaches, we introduced five projects that each brought a company's or a service's less visible value to life on the web.

* This article used AI to help with the translation.