Notes on the Redesign

Among design studios, there seems to be a back-and-forth trend when it comes to the breadth of portfolio presentation. On one end is the curated, highly selective portfolio of 5-10 pieces deemed to be most representative (i.e. most salable) — see any number of the recent “single-serving” one page sites. On the other end is the nothing-to-hide approach, offering up nearly everything ever produced by a studio — see portfolios of several years ago, or Experimental Jetset’s incredible (and incredibly extensive) archive.

This new site shares many similarities with those of the latter trend, but we’ve conceptualized it as something more permanent. In essence, we’re using our enormous, 12-year body of work to our advantage. Instead of a straight chronological listing of projects, we’re using their many common attributes (represented as tags — hardly a novel abstraction, but an easily understood one) as the basis of our system for navigating the site — a much more contextually meaningful way to browse our work. Everything is connected, allowing for a maximal amount of content that is tempered by a minimal and structured presentation.

While we don’t yet have everything up for your perusal, we’re working on it, and plan to continue adding newly completed projects to further improve our system with more data — the idea being additions, rather than editions. So check back soon.

Technical stuff

• Let’s get it out of the way upfront: IE6 isn’t supported. Given the design, it just wouldn’t be a reasonable concession. And given the tiny percentage of our visitors still using that albatross, it’s not much of a loss. Progressive degradation is a nice concept, but it only goes so far, and in this case “so far” is IE7 (through no small effort in itself).
• We’re not entirely in HTML5 Land yet — the benefits just don’t outweigh the requisite browser-sniffing. That said, as soon as SublimeVideo or Vimeo’s promised HTML5 player come to fruition, we’ll switch over our video reel player, the only remnant of Flash/non-mobile-friendliness on the site.
• Cufón is a stopgap, but an awesome one.
• Firefox has horrible text rendering of CSS-rotated elements. Somewhat excusable given that it’s not an official CSS standard yet, but annoying all the same. Safari and Chrome fare much better (and add a few proprietary-but-cool aesthetic flourishes here and there).
• We’re running everything on WordPress, which I’m sure our developers can tell you more about. It’s a bit jury-rigged, but has proven to be quite stable and usable, and, more importantly, allowed us to move away from pie-in-the-sky custom CMS talk and actually produce something real, which you’re seeing before you today.