Leena Fan

Leena Fan has built electric motors in Mumbai for more than 35 years. They go into cleanrooms, laboratories and chemical plants, across six product lines from standard induction motors to flame proof blowers. They are built to run, not to be looked at.

The brief had three parts: a small budget, motors that don’t look like much, and a website people would want to stay on. There was no room in the budget for a photo shoot, and no design was going to change what a motor looks like.

We couldn’t make the motors look different, so we stopped trying. The photos stay plain, and everything around them does the work: the colours, the type, the framing and the motion.

Buyers also come to a motor maker’s site with a job to do. They need the right model and a price. So the site had to be useful as well as good looking: every model in one catalogue, and one way to ask about several at once.

The top of the home page shows the approach. It starts with a plain photo, and each layer adds one small thing: warm paper with a faint grid, a fan wheel turning behind the photo, a soft frame with crop marks, a label with the line, name and specs, and five product lines that take turns every few seconds.

None of those layers needed a bigger budget. The motor is the same plain photo in every one.

The colours were already in the photos: the cream of the casing, the deep red of the wiring and the near-black of the blower housings. White would have made the motors look out of place, so the pages sit on warm paper instead.

Archivo gives the headlines weight and Inter keeps the reading easy. JetBrains Mono sets every spec, so 1400 RPM reads like a line on a nameplate.

Good looks get someone through the door. To keep them scrolling, every part of the home page brings something new: motors that change on their own, numbers that count up, a band of industries sliding past, and a process line that draws itself.

People stay longest when a site is useful. All 93 models are in the catalogue, across six lines. You can filter by line and speed, or search by HP, CFM or model.

Standard motors sit in four compact tables by mounting and phase. Every other line gets cards with a photo or drawing and its specs.

The part that does the most work is the enquiry list. You add motors as you browse, set the quantities and send one request, instead of a separate form for every motor.

The list is saved in your browser, so it is still there when you come back.

The site is live with a home page, the full catalogue of 93 models, product pages with specs and mounting dimensions, an about page and a contact page.

A buyer can put several motors in one list and send a single request, and the list waits for them if they leave and come back.

The budget stayed small, and the motors didn’t change at all. Only everything around them did.