Minimum effort, maximum result
The thinking behind the successful launch of 100 Years of Design by Second Story part of SapientNitro for AIGA’s Centennial.
As with most design exercises, editing is important. The visual design of AIGA’s 100 Year History may have ended with a minimalist approach but it far from the case when we initially explored this rich story. There were after all 100 years to cover… and, of course, there is so much more thinking behind it, and I would like to share with the design community how we tried approached this complex work and what’s the process behind the resulting work, all the different layer we meant to reveal.
We all knew this project was really a milestone into the AIGA 100 year history, at same time we were aware that will also be under the eyes of all designer all around the world, ready to legitimately judge, by all means. How the AIGA Executive Director Richard Grefé stated in this interview, our aim was setting the stage for the masterpieces and spark conversation, right because the same AIGA one hundred of years ago was born in a time of worldwide cultural flux, continuously adapting and leading the discussion on design’s value, sitting in the middle of the conversation between society and culture.
Organizing the story of design over the past century was no easy task but, for sure, we wanted to move away from a chronological timeline. We purpose then that the site should be to spark the conversation since the very starting point, so we selected five broad intents that most would be appropriate to define/constrain/contain for great design artworks, conscious that any of them could of course have multiple impacts depending on context and the viewer. That’s why we also leave viewers the open possibility to consider other intents by including the main open-ended prompt: “Celebrating 100 years of design that…”. The intention of the multicolored flashing underscore just after the main prompt is exactly that everyone can give a personal value to a specific artwork depending on the contest or their direct experience with it. Of course there were a lot of internal discussion of how the homepage would look like, whether or not to give a preview of the site content and how, especially when we had some of the best and most influential masterpieces of design to show in the last 100 years, in the end we were totally sure that what visitor will found later will repay him from minimal starting point.
We considered a number of options, for example, for the homepage including letting the viewer get a glimpse of the content inside. This was especially tempting because of the influential voices of design within the experience. At the end, we were certain that the minimal starting point of a flashing underscore was compelling.
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When you move among intentions horizontally to chose your favorite path to follow (or more appealing to you) discover that that flashing underscore actually comes to life as the least common denominator overall the whole website and give you access to all different layers of the five interactive narratives. Without even enter into one of them, help you to get a randomly glimpse of the content and accompanies you as a sort of narration glue throughout the whole intent path, all the way down until invite you to feel part of the conversation, concluding the journey by suggesting to add your own voice, function which is, however, constantly present in every moment of the navigation of the entire site. Not only, when necessary becoming a plus and pulsing to show you an additional layer to go deep into the details of that specific artifact, with 3 kind of different exploration that tell you much more about that particular designer, a piece of AIGA history or revealing supporting images that help you understanding the concept.
Ehi, where’s the parallax scrolling? With the proliferation scrolling narratives on many of today’s websites, we were eager to return to the core essence of what we were trying to achieve: make the experience simple and fun. We also made “locking” into the grid seamless and elegate. Familiar visual cues made navigating the micro-site obvious. With the average user staying on the page for xxx minutes, we felt it succeeded in offering an immersive experience. The length of the medium time staying on the site (from the statistics) tell us that however we can consider it an immersive experience.
We needed to make sure we have stories to tell. Personally, I have experienced every kind of emotion while reading books, listening to music or watching movies, I’ve reread sentences in books that made me feel great all of a sudden. Stories are all around and when transmitted well, they can take you through a lots personal of emotions. We needed to make sure we have a story to tell and we had directly the masters to tell them, with their own words. Their faces and voices who tell with their own words about actions and the contexts that inspired the creation of most of the masterpieces on the website is another layer of storytelling which with strength and firmness that can be said to be the heart-beating core of the whole experience. Their words are teaching, educate on values, fascinate us and, more often, we are taught that the secret behind an amazing piece of design is the simplicity of a winning idea.
We have tried to implement this simple teaching (n.d.r. going back to minimal/simplicity concept), and leave you the pleasure of discovering all the artifacts, add those who consider essential or missing, and explore website for other layers of the narrative.
