YAP Global
International PR agency for crypto and Web3 companies, rebranded and rebuilt against a hard conference deadline.
Overview
YAP Global is an international PR and communications agency for crypto, DeFi, and Web3 companies, founded in 2018 by former journalist Samantha Yap. By 2025 the agency had just been through a full brand refresh, new logo, new colors, new identity, but the website hadn't caught up.
I led the redesign at Natural Eye Media, covering UX, IA, content strategy, and copy across the homepage, service pages, case studies, careers, and a redesigned newsletter section called The Context, all built to a hard deadline: launch before EthCC, a major Web3 conference, on June 30, 2025.
TL;DR
Problem Statement
The rebrand had already happened, new logo, new colors, new identity, but the site hadn't caught up, and the client felt it: cluttered, forgettable, not converting. A glossary section meant to explain crypto terms was working against them; they wanted to read as a serious PR agency, not a Web3 101 course.
- Cluttered and not memorable
- Visitors weren't taking action on the site
- A glossary section that undercut the positioning they wanted
- No consistent way to show proof of past work
We'd rather have low traffic and high intent vs low intent and high traffic.
— YAP Global
Approach
I started from an internal discovery questionnaire, adapted for a rebrand context, and had the client fill it out across two passes plus a call, cross-referencing all three and treating the most recent answers as the ones that mattered when they conflicted. That surfaced five distinct audiences: business leads, newsletter subscribers, industry peers, journalists, job seekers.
The client pointed me to a competitor's homepage they liked and asked for a copy read, not a visual one, so I pulled out what was actually working there (a confident opening line, benefits-led service copy, credibility placed high) and rebuilt that structure in YAP's own voice. The IA followed the same conversion-first logic: hero, trust signals, case studies, services, newsletter, contact, getting a high-intent visitor to proof as fast as possible.
Showcase
Three homepage directions went in front of the client. Instead of picking a single winner, I took their detailed, section-by-section feedback on what to keep from each and merged the strongest pieces into one: the wins section and tile motif from one direction, the services structure from another, the testimonial treatment from a third.
The rebrand centered on a quotation-mark symbol tied to the agency's name, a nod to "yapping," their own word for storytelling. Rather than a static logo mark, I used it as a recurring visual anchor between sections, signaling continuity as the page scrolled from one part of the story to the next.
Design System
The client had used a physical newspaper prop at a conference to represent their newsletter, The Context. I carried that straight onto the site, building the section as an actual open-newspaper spread instead of a generic email signup block, so the physical and digital brand moments matched.
Two problems came up in launch week. The client wanted "learn more" arrows removed from service items pointing to unbuilt pages, dead links are worse than no links, so I swapped in small descriptive tags instead. And with internal pages still incomplete the day before launch, I reused the site's approved 404 styling to build a coming-soon page fast rather than push the launch back.
Conclusion
The site launched on schedule ahead of EthCC, coming-soon page and all. The founder's reaction to the 404 page was positive enough that the team reused its style under deadline pressure, and the relationship didn't end at launch, I was still producing new branded assets more than a year later. I don't have post-launch traffic or conversion numbers to share, so I'm leaving that out rather than guessing.
The real lesson was editing across three competing, client-approved directions instead of refining just one, merging specific feedback into a single coherent system rather than defending any one direction as "the" answer. If I did this again, I'd flag page-readiness risk earlier instead of solving it with a coming-soon page the day before launch.