Case study · AC Thermal
AC Thermal
A refined identity and fully custom website for AC Thermal, a locally owned HVAC company serving Metro Detroit, plus a billboard to match.
01 — Context
A Detroit HVAC company ready to look the part
AC Thermal is a locally owned and operated heating and cooling company in Detroit, offering air conditioning, heating, maintenance and commercial HVAC services to homes and businesses across the metro area. Its technicians had the expertise; its brand and website did not yet show it. Good HVAC website design and a stronger brand were how we set out to close that gap.
We started with discovery: understanding the business, its customers and what it needed its online presence to do. That led to a branding exercise to refine the visual identity, then a fully custom website design and build focused on making it easy for homeowners to choose AC Thermal and get in touch.
In the HVAC trade, people usually look for a contractor when something has gone wrong: no heat in January, no air in July. They want to feel they are calling a company that is local, competent and honest. Every decision in the brand and site comes back to that moment.
Doing the identity first meant the website could be designed with a finished palette, type pairing and logo in hand, instead of guessing at them. It also meant the same system was ready for everything beyond the site, starting with outdoor advertising.
02 — Identity
Hot and cold in one mark
The new logo mark puts a house outline and a circle together in navy, crossed by two flowing waves: one red, one blue. It says heating and cooling, home and comfort, in a single shape that still reads at favicon size. It works reversed out in white on navy for dark backgrounds, and in full colour on light ones. The wordmark beside it is set in bold, wide capitals for a dependable, no-nonsense feel.
We built a colour palette around that mark. Bright blue, deep navy and red carry the logo's meaning, while warm cardamom and copper tones and soft greys add a residential warmth that pure red and blue can lack. The palette is organised into primary, secondary and tertiary tiers, so anyone producing a new piece knows which colours lead and which support. The result looks professional on a billboard and approachable on a family's phone screen.
For headlines we paired a classic serif, set partly in italic, with a clean sans-serif for body copy. It gives AC Thermal a calm, trustworthy voice, and it carried straight into the billboard: "Stay cool this summer, stay warm this winter."
The billboard itself keeps to a few elements that can be read from a moving car: the two-line headline, a short prompt to call, the logo, and the web address in a white tab topped with a red rule. An outdoor air conditioning unit stands on a patch of grass against open sky, a calm image that makes year-round comfort feel tangible.
03 — Website
Custom HVAC website design built around the call
The homepage opens on a family at home and the line "Focus on what's important, & leave the rest to us." A navy badge reading "Your Metro Detroit HVAC Experts" answers the first question every visitor has: do they serve my area?
Below the hero, services sit in a row of tabs: Cooling, Heating, Maintenance and Commercial. Each opens a panel with a short description, a photo and a button to learn more. A strip of preferred equipment brands (American Standard, Bryant, Carrier, York, Robertshaw and Siemens) follows, a quick trust signal of the kind we cover in HVAC trust signals. Then a "We're committed to your comfort" section explains, in plain language, that AC Thermal is locally owned and operated and handles everything from simple air conditioning repairs to complex commercial installations.
Three cards then spell out why to choose AC Thermal: fast, reliable service, transparent pricing and experienced technicians. A seasonal offer banner gives an immediate reason to call, and a customer review in large serif type closes the section with a voice other than the company's own.
Our website design keeps calls to action in a deep burgundy so they stand out from the blues of the brand. We also handled the website development, building the site from scratch rather than on a template. Many of the same principles appear in our HVAC website design checklist. For another brand and website delivered together in 2025, see Tribal Custom Insurance.
What we delivered
Discovery, a refined identity, a custom website and outdoor advertising.
