Grant Thornton International

Grant Thornton International is a major global organisation of accounting and consulting firms. GTI is the parent for independently owned and managed firms in over 100 countries worldwide.

Angus Hyland at Pentagram was commissioned to design a new, unifying, global identity system for Grant Thornton partners. Angus – with whom we have worked since 1999 on projects including Canongate, Fifth Estate, Portobello Pictures – asked us to consult on the execution of his identity across over all GTI websites in scores of languages and on sites ranging from 3 to 10,000 pages – all of which would be launched concurrently.

Working on a project of this scale (and schedule) amplifies the usual problems of web design, so with this scale in mind, we proposed a fairly radical strategy of technical simplification that was designed to “work” for the myriad international users, webmasters and content management systems, whilst supporting a brilliant, innovative, and emphatically different design.

The answer came from quality and simplicity:

• Clean, elegant, intelligent design and build
• Full web (W3C) standards
• Semantic, search-engine oriented code
• Avoiding all javascript and other plug-ins
• Accessible (although no WAI or other rules were imposed)
• Best practice throughout

Team: Art Direction: Angus Hyland (Pentagram); Design: Fabian Herrmann (Pentagram); Project Direction: Nicolle Carter (Pentagram); Producer: Peter Collingridge; Code: Josh King-Farlow

The sites were launched in Spring 2008. Read more about GTI on the Pentagram site.)