The Brief
Red Seal Planning is the practice of Trent Henderson, a Tasmanian town planner working out of the Huon Valley. Trent came in semi-reluctantly. A business advisor had told him he needed a website to support the practice, and he’d taken that advice more on faith than on conviction. Plenty of professional service businesses get along just fine on word of mouth, and he wasn’t sure he wasn’t one of them.
We started with a brand conversation rather than a build conversation. It became clear pretty quickly that place mattered — the Huon Valley specifically, not just a generic Tasmanian gloss — and that the site needed to feel grounded in it.
Our Approach
Planning is a field where people tend to arrive anxious. They’ve hit a wall with council, they don’t know if their project is viable, or they’ve been told they need representation at a tribunal. The site needed to meet that anxiety with calm and competence, not marketing gloss.
I leaned hard into landscape photography to ground the brand in the Huon Valley itself — bushland, river, the rural settings that shape how planning actually plays out in this part of the state. Typography and layout stayed deliberately restrained so the imagery and the words could carry the feel. Trent’s brand colour — a deep, controlled red — runs through every CTA, so the trail to actually getting in touch is consistently obvious without being shouty.
Four of the duotone icons used through the site — one for each of the planning services Trent works across, picked for their quiet, restrained line work so they sit alongside the landscape photography rather than competing with it.
Services are broken out into clear pathways — development applications, heritage planning, urban design advice, tribunal assistance, planning representation, subdivision design — so visitors can self-identify quickly and read only what’s relevant to their situation. Client testimonials across sectors do the trust-building work that Trent’s too understated to do himself.
To round it off, I produced a small library of training videos walking Trent through the everyday updates — adding a new post, swapping a photo, refreshing service copy. Real screen-recordings, plain-language voiceover, indexed by task. The site is his to run.
For SEO, the build targeted the language Tasmanians actually use when they’re stuck — “planning consultant Tasmania”, “development application Hobart”, “heritage planning Tasmania”, “subdivision planner Tasmania” — with dedicated content supporting each service.
The Outcome
Since launch, Trent has reported back that he’s genuinely glad he did it. The site has opened doors he didn’t expect — enquiries from corners of the state and types of project he wasn’t actively chasing — and it’s done the quiet work of letting prospective clients assess whether he’s the right planner for their situation before they even pick up the phone.
Sometimes the website everyone says you should have is the one you actually needed.