Quarry Lane Industrial: a size you can see, held against a person and a pallet
Concept build. Quarry Lane Industrial is an invented firm. This was made to show how we approach a property brief, so nothing here is a client result and no figure describes a real business.
The brief we set ourselves
An industrial and warehouse agency covering the Black Country and south Staffordshire, handling stock that spans three orders of magnitude: a 2,000 sq ft trade counter unit up to a 120,000 sq ft distribution shed. A figure like "45,000 sq ft" means very little on its own to most occupiers walking into a building that size for the first time. The brief we set ourselves was to make the number legible as actual floor area, not just a bigger digit.
What we built
Floor-marking signage rather than a conventional hero: a ruled spec board carries the firm name and a live availability strip, computed from the schedule table rather than written by hand, sitting above a full-bleed warehouse-interior photograph with a safety-yellow measurement rule along its base. Franklin Gothic and Segoe UI Semibold carry the condensed, tracked display type; Consolas carries every figure on the page, from the schedule to the size readout, set in tabular numerals so columns of digits line up without manual padding. Zero border-radius, zero box-shadow, anywhere in the stylesheet.
A sticky comparator holds a spec panel still while four unit types (trade counter, light industrial, distribution warehouse, open storage land) change underneath it as the section scrolls, so the reader always has the same yardstick while the thing being measured against it changes.
The size overlay
The signature interaction is a measuring instrument, not a decorative slider. Drag a log-mapped range from 2,000 to 120,000 sq ft, or type a number directly, and a footprint outline grows over the warehouse photograph. Five reference silhouettes stay fixed at true scale in the same coordinate space and never move: a standing person, a Euro pallet, a 40ft ISO container, an articulated lorry trailer, a five-a-side pitch. Only the footprint changes size around them, so the eye always has something real to measure against.
A live readout reports square feet, square metres, an approximate pallet-position count and a typical eaves-height band for that size, with the assumptions behind the derived figures stated on the panel rather than presented as fact. The pallet count in particular depends on a stated racking density, not a guarantee.
Quarry Lane's brand runs on safety yellow, and it's worth saying plainly: that yellow measures 1.27:1 against the pale concrete ground used elsewhere on the page, nowhere near the 4.5:1 a focus indicator needs. A brand colour can't be trusted to solve that on its own. The build uses a double focus ring: a charcoal outline plus a yellow halo further out, so there's always at least one ring with enough contrast against whatever background it lands on.
Details that did the work
- The schedule table's sort headers are real buttons, not styled divs, so keyboard operation needs no extra handling
- The table scrolls horizontally inside its own bounded frame on narrow screens rather than hiding its column headers
- Copy names the actual instruments (the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 Part II, MEES minimum E, the VOA's Check/Challenge/Appeal process) instead of rounding to "flexible" or "great space"
- No promise of letting speed and no claim of escaping portal fees, in line with what the firm can actually control
Where it stands
Audited at 88 out of 100 across usability, uniqueness, beauty and freedom from generic AI patterns. It shipped with one real defect: a table rule that forced the whole page wide on a phone. Caught in the browser pass rather than left for a client to find, and fixed before this went into the portfolio.