Plus Therapeutics Website

Plus Therapeutics is a U.S. clinical-stage pharmaceutical company, focused on targeted therapies to treat cancer.

The Challenge

Create a website that positioned Plus as a standout in the overcrowded arena of clinical-stage cancer treatment about-to-go-public companies.

The Details

I originally wore an Art Director hat for this concept – I pitched an illustrative concept involving images made up of circular elements, with a singular orange element depicting the targeted cancer. While the client made the decision to go with my colleague's more human-centric concept, my illustrative idea was necessary to illustrate what was happening in the scientific imagery. We lovingly call this a frankencomp on our team – a little of column A, a little of column B. Thankfully these concepts blended well together.

My role quickly morphed into product design while my colleague thought out the rest of the art. Because the concept was so motion heavy with indicators placed over imagery, a well-planned design system was needed to make sure dev could build a lean site with minimal load times.

Quickly realizing that what worked for desktop was not going to fly on mobile, I pivoted into a system that embraced device requirements instead of fighting against them. Wide illustrations on desktop became 2-slide carousels that switched automatically to give the user the ability to see all information without forcing a stop scroll (notoriously hated by users). Copy was masterfully written by our Copywriter to stay within easily-digestible chunks. Working with dev to make each bit of code work as lean as possible created practical animations that helps the user digest the science in bite-sized pieces, no matter the level of mastery.

When we started to build the site, a happy accident in rendering hero imagery created the cutout A in Adding. Realizing that it made the concept stronger by imprinting a + in the positioning line, calling back to the logo and the concept itself, we kept it and spread it throughout the site's positioning lines on primary pages.

The Validation

We launched the website two days before Plus went public, and the company ended their IPO a dollar higher than expected at the closing bell – again, completely because of the creative of course!