Vinal and Vinal Law
Vinal and Vinal Law is a woman-owned Buffalo civil litigation firm that represents people like you and me. For more than 30 years, they’ve represented victims of injury, racial discrimination, and other catastrophic events. Many of their attorneys and staff have experienced injury, loss, and adversity themselves or have watched someone they love experience it. Their practice is devoted to providing the highest level of legal work to the injured, the poor, and the people who service the injured and poor.
When Olivia Mullen, their associate attorney, came to me, it was on a recommendation from Steven Salcedo, an appeals attorney whose website I had designed in 2024. They needed a new, modern website that would spotlight their firm’s capabilities, make it easy for people to navigate, and show off their new brand.
Done and done. I absolutely love giving women business owners the website they deserve!
The old website
Vinal and Vinal’s old website had been built on WordPress “back in the day.” It sported an outdated “boxes within boxes” design and broken widgets, and was difficult for the staff to maintain and update. The site hadn’t been properly optimized for search engines and had a confusing page structure with very little information on each page. An overhaul was definitely in order. Here’s a look at their old website home page:
The web design process
Olivia was working with a graphic designer to create a new brand that included a fresh logo, a mature color palette, and an updated font suite. She also worked with a local photographer who took updated headshots of each staff member, as well as a fabulous group shot for the site’s home page.
All she needed was a list of places where she could download some high-quality stock photos to round out the design and a wording outline so she could provide headings, paragraphs, and button labels. Done and done!
One of the first questions I get asked during every website project strategy call is, “How long will this take?” And my answer is always the same: “I work as quickly as you do. As soon as you have all of the content for your new site finalized, I can get started on design.” Vinal’s project started in April 2024 and the site launched in October 2025—a full 18 months later. And that’s okay! Gathering all of the content for a new website is a lift, and I never want my clients to feel like they have to prioritize their project over everything else that’s happening in their lives. I have the best clients in the world, and they’re well worth waiting for. Vinal & Vinal was no exception!
As soon as Olivia was ready with finalized content, I got off to the races on design.
Their new brand color palette shifted from white-and-green to mature shades of cream, cinnamon, and brown. I used that color palette as the foundation for the new site. With the exception of their staff headshots, every photo on the site is black-and-white and paired with a gentle brown color wash to make it blend into the background.
Vinal’s new logo sports a minimalist square mark, and I used that as the inspiration for the rest of the site. All of the buttons, content cards, and form fields are squared off, with delicate borders to make them stand out from the site’s cream background.
Most importantly of all, I built their new website with the future in mind. Over the course of our project, the site’s content and page structure was significantly pared down. In addition to a layout library containing all of the site’s custom designs, I created hidden skeleton designs for several pages and an events calendar. When the Vinal team is ready to use those pages in the future, it’ll be easy to flesh them out and publish them using the instructions in their custom training video. Sweet.
Take a look at their new website home page!
