Rebuilding District 3’s site and design system post-rebrand
After a complete organizational rebrand, I rebuilt the website of Concordia's innovation hub from the ground up, ending years of vendor lock-in and giving the new brand a digital home meant to inspire Canadian entrepreneurship.
The Catalyst
District 3 had just completed a massive rebrand, redefining itself as a bold, ambitious innovation ecosystem. Its digital front door was still a decade-old WordPress site: built by an external agency, tangled in proprietary plugins, and impossible to update without a support ticket.
The vendor lock-in was a running frustration, and the strategic problem was bigger: D3 wanted to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs while its own technology was stuck in the past. The team decided to replace the site outright rather than patch it.
The Journey: 12 Months of Transformation
- Months 1–3: brand transformation · District 3 redefined itself from a simple incubator to a comprehensive innovation ecosystem, and Paul Geiben developed the new brand identity with four key personality axes.
- Months 4–7: research and planning · Extensive user journey mapping, audience research, and technical architecture planning. We identified the vendor lock-in problems with the old WordPress site and designed integration strategies for D3's operational stack.
- Months 6–8: design development · Paul and I collaborated on translating the bold brand vision into feasible web layouts.
- Months 8–12: development · I built the site on Webflow with the Client First framework, implemented the Podio-Zapier-Webflow automation pipeline, and created the dynamic portfolio system for 1400+ startups.
- December 2024 – January 2026: launched at D3's 10-year anniversary event, then refined through user feedback, performance optimization, and feature additions until my contract with D3 ended.
The Design-Development Partnership
This project's success hinged on the tight collaboration between design and development. Paul's vision was ambitious and brand-driven; my role was to make it technically feasible without compromising its integrity.
Paul's design called for
How I built it
Massive, "brash and busy" typography, central to the new brand. Standard web fonts could not deliver it: sizing drifted between browsers, line breaks landed in the wrong places, and layouts fell apart at responsive breakpoints
I treated the typography as art instead, converting each headline into a lightweight SVG that scales to any screen while keeping the exact letterforms Paul drew
Full-bleed layouts with very little horizontal padding (except on ultrawide screens), and an entirely different design for mobile and desktop, so every section needed two versions
I developed a system of flexible parent components with mobile and desktop child variants that adapt to Paul's vision and stay maintainable without building every page from scratch
Technical Architecture
The technical goal: end the vendor lock-in and integrate the site with D3's "Zapier-glued" operational stack, using tools a future team could maintain without me.
I chose Webflow for its CMS, visual development interface, and integration options. Building on the Client-First naming convention kept the project scalable and legible for future team members, even those without deep coding knowledge.
For the first time, D3 needed an online, public-facing portfolio of its 1400+ startups. Managing it by hand would be impossible, so I designed and built a full data pipeline to automate the process from end to end.
- Trigger · A startup completes a key program, and its status is updated in our Podio CRM
- Request · An automation creates an "Information Request" and emails the startup a custom form to collect public-facing data
- Submission · When the form is submitted, the data is linked back to the startup profile in a "Website Database" workspace in Podio
- Quality control · The marketing team gets a notification to review the submitted content for quality and brand alignment
- Publication · With one click on a "Publish to Site" button, the marketing team triggers a Zapier workflow that instantly sends the approved data to the Webflow CMS
- The startup's profile is live on the public site
A Site to Create Entrepreneurs
The site had to serve existing entrepreneurs and recruit new ones. Canada loses founders to the US, and D3 wants to build a startup culture that competes globally; the website is one of its main recruiting tools.
We mapped user journeys for three audiences: startups, investors, and the general public. The information architecture guides each through a tailored path with the same underlying goal, conveying the energy, ambition, and possibility of the entrepreneurial route. Content that inspires a student to start a company also serves as a proof point for a potential investor.
Launch & Impact
The new site launched at D3's 10-year anniversary event in December 2024. Engagement rose on the metrics we tracked:
3x
Increase in time spent on site
85%
Higher page exploration rates
40%
Improved application completion
Reflection: Brand-First Development
The rebrand drove the technical work from start to finish. We integrated the site with D3's operational systems and its mission rather than treating it as a standalone marketing page.
Working with Paul produced solutions neither of us would have reached alone: his brand vision pushed me into techniques like the SVG typography, and my technical constraints fed back into his layouts.
D3's mission of inspiring Canadian entrepreneurship shaped the UX decisions throughout, from the information architecture down to the automation workflows. We built the site to create entrepreneurs as much as to serve them.
Situation
District 3 completed a major rebrand, but the public website was still a legacy WordPress product with outdated UX, fragmented content flows, and agency lock-in for every update.
Task
Turn the rebrand into a scalable digital product: redesign the experience for startups, investors, and the public, remove vendor lock-in, and make ongoing publishing easy for internal teams.
Action
I operated across product, UX, and build: co-defined IA and page patterns, built a full design system in Figma, translated it into a Client-First Webflow implementation, and set up a Figma-to-Webflow workflow plus Podio-Zapier-Webflow automation for maintainable publishing.
Result
The new site launched at the 10-year anniversary event, increased engagement (3x time on site, 85% higher page exploration, 40% better application completion), and gave the team a maintainable system they can evolve without external dependency.