Canon Web Design

Overview

Canon Business Process Services delivers a vast range of outsourcing and logistics solutions to Fortune 1000 companies worldwide. When their digital presence stopped keeping pace with their ambitions, they brought me in to turn it around — and the results spoke loudly enough that they asked me back five years later to do it all over again.

The Problem

The Canon BPS website looked dated — and in a competitive outsourcing market, perception is everything. Bounce rates were climbing, SEO rankings were slipping, and rivals were winning business through a stronger digital presence.

The pressure to act was already high when a previously hired agency failed to deliver, leaving the project abandoned and the team anxious about starting again. That’s when I arrived: a solo consultant, walking into a New York office carrying the weight of a failed engagement and a team that needed a reason to believe this time would be different.

Rebuilding Trust

My first task wasn’t to open Figma. It was to listen. I sat with three stakeholders and one developer, acknowledged exactly what had gone wrong, and laid out a different way of working — one built on transparency, regular check-ins every other day, and a commitment to making every person in the room feel ownership over the outcome.

“Previous work had failed. The team carried that anxiety into our first meeting. Turning that around before a single pixel was placed was the most important design decision of the project.”

Meetings became live design sessions. The developer joined every review, keeping technical feasibility front and centre from day one. What began as cautious collaboration evolved into genuine creative momentum.

Brand Foundation

Before any screens were designed, we ran a brand workshop. Five people in a room, a shared goal, and one question: what three words should this site make you feel?

These three words became a filter for every decision that followed — from typographic weight to the bold diagonal shapes that gave the layout its energy.

Planning & Architecture

With direction agreed, the work became methodical. A content audit mapped every page against required content types, templates, and modular components. A project timeline kept all fifteen page types on track across five weeks of delivery.

Understanding the User

Two distinct audiences visited the site, each arriving with different intent. New visitors landed on service-specific pages through organic search. Returning visitors came direct — sometimes running the same organic search again or through a marketing email — already familiar with Canon and looking to evaluate more deeply.

Despite arriving differently, both shared a single core goal:

“I have a need for outsourced services and want to evaluate Canon against several factors.”

We identified three questions every visitor needed answered before they’d consider picking up the phone or sending an email:

1. Orientation — Can you do what I need?
2. Experience — Have you done this in my industry, at scale?
3. Trust — Why should I trust you?

Early designs of the homepage ensured every piece of content, every call-to-action was there to answer these questions in sequence — building confidence with each scroll.

Design Execution

When a stakeholder suggested using bold trapezium shapes to add movement to content sections, it passed our brand filter immediately — confident, dynamic, successful.

Modular components were built for both mobile and desktop, then composed into reusable page templates — a system flexible enough to serve dozens of service verticals while remaining visually cohesive.

The Result

The site launched on time. Stakeholders were satisfied. But the numbers did the real talking: sales leads climbed 60%, employment applications rose 25%, and bounce rates fell.

Five Years Later

Canon Business Process Services came back. Same process, same principles, new site — this time to redesign the live experience at CBPS.Canon.com. The foundation we built together had lasted long enough to earn a second chapter.