Design work often moves in cycles. The rhythm is simple: design, present, wait for feedback. Rinse and repeat. It’s comforting at times, monotonous at others. It’s a rhythm familiar to anyone in the craft. But every so often, a project emerges that'll puncture that rhythm, reminding you why you care so deeply about the work.

At first glance, Lilydale Free Range Chicken was hardly the most dazzling brief. It wasn’t fashion, art, or even glossy e-commerce. It was chicken. Raw, packaged chicken. The task? To consolidate two existing websites: a recipe hub and the master brand site, into a single digital experience.

On paper, the brief was minimal. The brand guidelines offered little to build on for digital, and the visual identity leaned heavily on Gotham, a typeface whose geometric bluntness can often work against the warmth we wanted to convey. A wet blanket. So I dug deep. With Lilydale, I drew from subtle brand cues: the curves on their packaging, the muted warmth of their colour palette, the quiet gestures that could be amplified and brought forward. The result was a digital environment that felt human, approachable, and quietly confident.

When we presented the work, we were met with stunned faces across the client team.
“It looks great… I wasn’t expecting this,” one of them said. A comment that could be read as either a compliment or a sign of how modest their expectations had been. But it was a moment that underscored something important: as designers, we have the ability not just to meet requirements but to shift perceptions, to elevate what was expected into something more thoughtful, more resonant, more alive.

It’s easy to underestimate the impact of small moments in the design process: the choice of a curve, the tone of a microinteraction, the space you allow around an image or a headline. But those decisions add up. They shape the way people feel when they encounter a brand online.  

Even when it’s raw chicken.