Client Onboarding Portal

The brief came from a small design studio that kept losing time on the first two weeks of every new engagement. Contracts moved by email, brand assets lived in scattered folders, and the kickoff call always started with someone asking for a file that had already been sent twice. The studio wanted a single place where a new client could land, see what happens next, and hand over the materials the team actually needed.

We started by mapping the real sequence of events, not the ideal one. The portal needed to cover three moments: the signed agreement, the asset collection, and the first review milestone. Each step had to be obvious to someone who had never used the studio's tools before. That meant plain labels, a visible progress line, and no hidden requirements buried in paragraphs.

The design followed the studio's existing visual identity, so the portal felt like a natural extension of their brand rather than a separate utility. Terracotta accents marked the active step, while completed stages settled into a muted neutral tone. The layout stayed deliberately quiet, letting the checklist and the upload areas carry the attention.

• A short welcome screen that explains the three steps before asking for anything
• Guided upload fields for logos, brand guidelines, and reference imagery
• A simple status indicator that shows which step is waiting and what comes next
• Automatic confirmation emails triggered when a client completes a stage

The build took four weeks from the first wireframe to the handover. We tested the flow with two existing clients before launch, which caught a few confusing labels and one broken upload path. After the portal went live, the studio reported that the average time from signed contract to first creative review dropped by about a week. More importantly, the kickoff calls stopped being about file hunting and started being about the work itself.

The project also changed how the studio thought about its own process. Seeing the steps laid out so plainly made them question why certain approvals took as long as they did. The portal became a small mirror of their workflow, and that reflection was useful in ways the original brief never mentioned.