Zealand Pharma
Zealand Pharma is a large-cap, Denmark-listed company with a purpose-driven mission to transform lives through next-generation peptide R&D therapeutics. Their innovation is focused on three key therapeutic areas: obesity, rare diseases, and chronic inflammation.
With over 25 years of expertise in discovering, designing, and developing therapeutic peptides, Zealand Pharma has refined its strategy to prioritise investment in peptide R&D. While maintaining a focus on its three key therapeutic areas, the company has shifted towards leveraging its strengths in design and development, scaling back on commercial operations in favour of increased global co-development and commercialisation partnerships.
To support their refined strategy, we were tasked with developing the brand and conducting a comprehensive digital review, culminating in the redesign and rebuild of the Zealand Pharma website to better align with their business and strategic objectives.
A UX-led approach
Our starting point was a deep dive into understanding the business, market, and competitive landscape. This included identifying pain points, opportunities, and business objectives, as well as pinpointing key areas for improvement in the website rebuild. By analysing first-party data to gather both quantitative and qualitative insights, and leveraging our domain expertise, we developed a prioritised roadmap of recommended improvements. This informed a robust, UX-led scope for the redesign and build of the new Zealand Pharma website.


Developing a digital brand
With a well-established visual identity that was highly regarded in the market, the corporate identity remained unchanged. However, the broader brand had not been optimised for digital applications and failed to reflect the ambition, personality, and pioneering innovation embedded in the business’s DNA.
Through deep immersion into the business, including interview and workshop sessions, we gained a thorough understanding of its strategic and commercial differentiation. The insights gained enabled us to further evolve the brand, ensuring it authentically reflected Zealand Pharma’s individuality and achieved standout in the market.
Creating a brand visual language
To enhance individuality and balance the clean simplicity of the sans-serif typography and predominant use of white space, we introduced an illustrative style as a new element of the brand’s visual language. Reflecting Zealand Pharma’s R&D-focused strategy, the illustrations evolve from representing scientific ‘thinking’ to ‘actualisation,’ incorporating alpha helices to symbolise their deep expertise in peptide chemistry and biology.
Complementing the illustrative style, a curated mix of photography was incorporated, ranging from portraits and science-based imagery to reportage lab and patient photography. This was paired with simple yet striking hand-drawn illustrations, which were used as image overlays, backgrounds, and to enhance the user experience by highlighting and promoting key content.


A future-proofed technical platform
Early-stage technical audits and consultancy highlighted the need for a user-friendly CMS to streamline content management while supporting editorial hierarchies and governance for multiple content owners and publishing roles. Building the new site on Umbraco has delivered a market-leading platform, enabling future technical development and integrations, from DXP solutions and language variants to advanced personalisation and third-party integrations.




Security, compliance and accessibility
The website was developed to comply with all EU regulations, as well as specific Danish laws governing publicly listed companies and the pharmaceutical industry. Built to WCAG AA standards and integrated with UserWay, it delivers enhanced accessibility and complies with all global and localised privacy laws. Additionally, the site integrates third-party platforms for share price information and regulatory news alerts, all of which were carefully managed during the technical scoping and build process. Hosted on our Microsoft Azure and Cloudflare architecture, the solution provides enterprise-level reliability and security – our standard approach for all client hosting solutions.


We were seeking a distinctive and sophisticated website that would reflect Zealand Pharma’s innovative peptide R&D and capture our unique culture …and SampsonMay delivered.