Interactive Annual 18:
Self-Promotion
Hybrid Design
A clean, effective portfolio and online presentation. Kelly Goto
I loved this well-organized collection that is equal parts sensible philosophy and bold project selections. It elegantly highlights pride in the work and not simply the clients.
David Wright
As a primary source of its promotion and new business, Hybrid Design wanted its website to be easily navigable, with a smooth viewing experience, and to provide enough context for the studios work, without becoming overly cumbersome or daunting. This bold, graphic and colorful showcasewith a minimized navigation and organized access to the studios projects and methodologythat functions well and looks great on a variety of screen sizes.
- • Designing the site took about four months, from concept development to deployment.
- • Developed in Flash Builder using ActionScript3, the site takes advantage of some of the studios favorite frameworks: Gaia and the GreenSock tweening library.
- • The navigation consists of a simplified catalog-style browsing experience that can quickly filter a large body of work.
Comments by Ed OBrien and Matt Maher
Designing for yourself is never easy, but in the end, we kept coming back to the idea that, as with any experience, content is king. The challenge of creating a site that could display a large body of work in an easy-to-use format required designing a navigation style that allowed quick filtering of many cross-category projects. The solution we landed on kept things minimal, allowing us to focus on the rich visual images and putting featured work front and center. The feedback to this content-first approach has been overwhelmingly positive, as often times people are left sifting through small, overly cropped images of work.
Obviously, technology changes, and when we revise the site next time, there will be updates, in both technology and functionality. We are constantly looking for ways to improve it, as everybody has a different point of entry and browsing experience. The benefit of this being our own site, is that we can implement them.
Credits
Ed OBrien, graphic designer
Dora Drimalas/Brian Flynn, creative directors
Matt Maher, programmer
Hybrid Design (San Francisco, CA), project design and development