Overview
MindsOpen is an international business psychology consulting firm based in Boston. For their 10-year anniversary, they undertook a full rebrand and redesign. I worked alongside Ian Robinson of OK GO Studio, who led art direction and design, while I handled development.
My role was to bring the Figma design to life in Webflow with custom animations, flexible CMS functionality, and on-page SEO enhancements.
I also helped extend the design system as new requests came up during the build.
Deliverables:
- Custom Webflow website build
- Keyword research and SEO guidance
- Flexible, scalable, and filterable CMS
- Custom animations and interactions
Challenge
MindsOpen’s founder, Neil Jacobs, realized his old website no longer reflected the character, values, or mission of the firm. The new site needed to introduce the brand as professional yet approachable, authoritative yet imaginative, experienced yet forward-thinking.
The challenges we set out to solve included:
- Interactive brand expression: Neil chose Webflow because he wanted custom animations and interactions that would bring the new brand identity to life without hurting performance.
- Content scalability: MindsOpen publishes articles, case studies, and podcast episodes. The CMS needed to be flexible, filterable, and easy for the team to manage internally.
- Support visibility and performance: The site needed to launch with strong on-page SEO foundations (keyword strategy, metadata, performance optimizations) without sacrificing user experience.
- Empower the team — Neil wanted to manage content in-house, so the CMS needed to be intuitive and the build clean, maintainable, and documented.
Solution
Using a mix of Webflow’s native interaction tools and custom code, I delivered a polished, responsive build that faithfully executed the design while layering in thoughtful motion and flexible content management.
- Custom animations: Created signature interactions — most notably a “heartbeat” spotlight animation on the homepage headline and branded SVG hover states on service cards — that gave the site imagination and personality without losing professionalism.
- Flexible CMS: Built a scalable CMS for MindsOpen’s content library, including filters and categorization, so articles, case studies, and podcasts could all be managed in one system.
- SEO-friendly build: Structured pages with semantic headings, alt text, and metadata, ensuring animations and visuals didn’t come at the cost of performance or discoverability.
- Client empowerment: Provided training and documentation so Neil and his team could confidently manage updates and avoid common pitfalls in Webflow.
Custom Animations
Animations were pivotal to the MindsOpen brand refresh. For example, on the homepage, I created a spotlight “heartbeat” animation around the H1 headline. Since this effect wasn’t possible with Webflow’s native tooling, I used custom CSS and keyframe animations:
On service cards, subtle hover interactions animated SVG line patterns and accent colors (see below), giving the site a tactile and engaging feel.
Flexible CMS
The CMS was built to handle MindsOpen’s diverse publishing needs — articles, client stories, and podcast episodes. Each content type was carefully structured with fields for categorization, tags, and SEO metadata.
Filters allow users to easily sort content by type or theme, while the backend remains intuitive for the team. This setup enables MindsOpen to grow their content library without requiring further dev work.
Custom Animations
Animations were pivotal to the MindsOpen brand refresh. For example, on the homepage, I created a spotlight “heartbeat” animation around the H1 headline. Since this effect wasn’t possible with Webflow’s native tooling, I used custom CSS and keyframe animations:
On service cards, subtle hover interactions animated SVG line patterns and accent colors (see below), giving the site a tactile and engaging feel.
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Flexible CMS
The CMS was built to handle MindsOpen’s diverse publishing needs — articles, client stories, and podcast episodes. Each content type was carefully structured with fields for categorization, tags, and SEO metadata.
Filters allow users to easily sort content by type or theme, while the backend remains intuitive for the team. This setup enables MindsOpen to grow their content library without requiring further dev work.
Results
The new site successfully captured MindsOpen’s updated brand identity: clean, professional, and credible, yet imaginative and approachable. The combination of custom animations, a flexible CMS, and SEO enhancements gave Neil a site that both elevates the firm’s image and supports their long-term content strategy.
The launch also strengthened MindsOpen’s SEO foundation through semantic markup, metadata, and keyword targeting, ensuring their content would be more easily discovered.
When the site went live, Neil shared that he received “great responses” from his network, affirming that the redesign struck the right tone. Since then, this project has become one of my most complimented portfolio pieces, with prospects often noting its polish and interactivity.
"We had a great experience working with Matt. We'll come back to him for future work and will recommend him to others. Matt was always willing and able to find solutions to any issues that arose during the project. He was very responsive to questions. Furthermore, he explained technical issues clearly and his instructional videos were very informative. This enabled knowledge transfer from him to us. He remained calm and objective throughout the project and was patient with our many emails! He engaged us in a very professional manner. Lastly, we appreciated Matt making time for conversations to talk through progress and next steps. We found that very helpful and it contributed to the success of the project. Matt delivered a first-class web build and we are thrilled with the outcome."
Neil Jacobs
Founder, MindsOpen
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