They asked for a facelift. Their members got a website that works.

ISOS's existing site was built in a hurry: a stock WordPress theme with the brand colors swapped in and little else. It looked unprofessional next to their recently updated branding, and it made everyday tasks harder than they should be.

They wanted a full redesign but had the time and budget for a visual refresh only. So the brief that reached me was "make it look better." I took the brief, with one private amendment: wherever a component was getting redesigned anyway, it should also work better. This case study is about how far that gets you.

I built a core design system around ISOS's new brand palette: type, color, spacing, and the components the site would reuse. Not a flex, a survival tool: with one month and one designer, consistency had to come from the system, not from vigilance.

The old hero was a stack of CTAs and announcements. Understandable, but it read as noise. The new hero is a full-width photo of colleagues at work: the feeling of a professional community you'd want to belong to. One CTA sits on top of it, and it's not decorative: ISOS urgently needed members to update their professional information, so that action got the most valuable pixel real estate on the site.

The site needed lots of reusable elements, so I designed modular components. Three of them show the "facelift as Trojan horse" approach:

Search, in the navigation. Accountants mostly visit the site to grab a specific professional document. They shouldn't have to guess which menu it hides under. A search bar in the main nav gives users who know what they want a straight line to it.

Preview before download. Documents used to be plain text links: click, download, open, discover it's the wrong file, repeat. The new component lets users preview a document before downloading, so they only pull the files they actually need.

Curated links instead of a logo grid. The old "useful links" section was a grid of institution logos, each linking to that institution's homepage, leaving users to hunt from there. I replaced it with a tab component: pick an institution, get a curated list of its most-used resources. Fewer clicks, and the destination is the actual thing people need.

Before

After

For the brand layer, I pulled the geometry of ISOS's new logo into banners and the footer, so the rebrand shows up as a consistent visual language rather than a logo swap.

Trace the geometry

The logo's silhouette, scaled up into a photo frame.

Same silhouette anchoring the identity block, logo in its corner.

The site's most critical feature is the registry of Macedonian accountants and firms: workplace, license status, contact details, a dozen data points per entry, thousands of entries. Users previously downloaded enormous PDFs and scrolled. Finding one person meant fighting a document.

I replaced the PDFs with searchable, paginated tables. Type a name, get the record. This is the single biggest UX win of the project, shipped inside a "visual refresh."

Mobile is where the judgment call lived. A dozen columns don't fit a phone, and I didn't like either standard fix:

• Horizontal scroll: users lose the first column (the legend) the moment they swipe.
• Sticky first column: works for short tables, falls apart on tables this long.

So I went a third way: on small screens, each row becomes a card. Card layouts usually hurt scanability, but here search and pagination were already doing the finding. Nobody scans thousands of cards; they search, and the card presents one result cleanly.

The budget said "facelift," but nothing about a facelift prevents good decisions. When you can't expand the scope, expand what each item inside the scope accomplishes.