When Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (CML) chose us for this project, the first thing we felt was the weight of responsibility. It’s not every day you’re invited to redesign the digital experience of the country’s main municipal authority. And it was exactly that added responsibility that pushed us to raise our game.

For this project, LOAD took on design and development roles, with our work centered primarily on UX and UI design, while the development component served mainly as technical support for implementation.
Before a single line of code was written, our design team began mapping out the real complexity of the project. What we found was a digital product that had grown through many hands over many years, with all the marks that leaves behind.

The first challenge was structural: a huge volume of information scattered across different URLs, with no clear architecture to guide the user. The second was functional: the website served completely distinct profiles, from the Lisbon resident trying to sort out a specific task, to CML’s internal teams with their own needs and goals. The third, and perhaps the most delicate, was political: a municipal website isn’t just a digital tool. It’s a communication instrument with implications that go far beyond usability.

As the project progressed, new challenges kept surfacing. The question of visual identity put us in front of a strategic decision: build a new identity from scratch, with all the time that requires, or leverage one of the visual identities already active within CML? Then, as we reorganized content, we ran into something that’s almost inevitable in products that grow over many years: redundancies, inconsistencies, and accumulated “noise.” CML itself was aware of these symptoms, which is why they sought a partner with the experience and the outside perspective needed to tackle them. Finally, ensuring visual consistency and accessibility across such a large volume of content was a constant challenge, but one we managed well together with the CML team.

We started at the beginning: a kick-off to align on objectives and define the approach together. This was followed by a workshop with the CML team to identify strengths, weaknesses, and priorities, and then an internal LOAD workshop to map the existing information architecture and uncover real opportunities for improvement.

From there, the process was iterative. We created wireframes for review and co-creation, applied the look and feel based on the previously defined identity, and built a complete design system, made up of a component library and design foundations that ensured consistency not just at this stage, but throughout every stage that followed.
One detail we’re particularly proud of is that the design system was built so CML could manage its digital product autonomously in the future, independent of LOAD.

We went beyond the original scope. Beyond the discovery and design work, LOAD made additional recommendations so CML’s product team would have stronger internal foundations for maintaining and evolving the new website correctly. And when it came time to support development, our engineering team adapted to CML’s existing tech stack, meeting the project’s needs and ensuring smooth, effective collaboration.

From everything we delivered in partnership with CML, we handed over a set of responsive layouts designed for the website’s key strategic pages, which served as a reference for building every other page outside this project’s scope.

More than a redesign, we delivered a fresher, more dynamic visual approach grounded in CML’s existing visual identity, resulting in imagery and communication that better represent who CML is today. A more intuitive navigation, with less complexity for the end user. A visual language consistent with the other touchpoints of the Câmara Municipal de Lisboa brand, with carefully crafted animations and a creative exploration of its colors and geometries.

And perhaps the most strategic deliverable of all: a Design System, organized and built to support the digital product’s evolution and scalability with visual and functional consistency.