Responses by Standard Projects.
Background: Microdot is a post-production studio working across film, fashion and advertising—its projects rage from Maison Margela to Nike to Nothing. The studio needed a brand and digital experience that could hold its own in those conversations while reflecting its personality: technically rigorous, creatively ambitious and deeply rooted in cinema. The audience consists of directors, producers, agencies and brands looking for a post partner who can elevate their work—people who will notice the details and care about the craft.
Design thinking: We started with Microdot’s duality in being both experimental and exacting in equal measure; that tension became the foundation of our work. Rather than illustration post-production literally, we built the identity from cinema’s own language: the edge codes, timecodes, film grain and scrubbers that exist behind the scenes. These elements gave us a system that feels authentic to the craft without being didactic about it. Taking those elements and experimenting with them let us create profound expressions from precise source material. The positioning—“rendering imagination”—tied it together and focused the work, a phrase both literal, as rendering is what Microdot does, and aspirational, as the studio brings imagination to its post production work. Everything flows from that idea.
Challenges: Making the website feel immersive and cinematic without overshadowing Microdot’s actual work. Its portfolio is the point, so the brand needed to frame it and not compete with it. We had to find a balance where the experience felt distinctive and considered but knew when to step back. That meant being disciplined about where to deploy the more expressive elements and where to let the work breathe. Every microinteraction, transition and treatment had to earn its place.
Favorite details: The way the cinematic references are integrated rather than applied. It would have been easy to make the film language decorative—just slap a timecode on something and call it a day. Instead, we tried to understand why those elements exist and let that inform how they function in the system. The edge codes aren’t just visual flair; they work typographically and structurally. The scrubber interactions on the site aren’t just a not to editing software; they shape how you move through the content. When the references feel native rather than borrowed, that’s when you know the system is working.
Visual influences: A lot of it came from the source material—film prints, editing interfaces, title sequences and end credits—and from the client. We spent time looking at how the information is displayed in professional post-production environments: the density of data, the rhythm of timecodes and the clinical beauty of a well-organized timeline. Beyond that, there is an obvious debt to designers who have worked at the intersection of film and graphic design, people like Saul Bass and Pablo Ferro as well as the A24 aesthetic. However, we were careful not to pastiche. The goal was to absorb the logic of our references and not replicate their surface.
Specific project demands: Microdot’s founders have exceptional taste and deep technical knowledge. They weren’t precious about the process, but they had strong instincts about what felt right for them. That clarity made decision-making faster and the collaboration more productive. We weren’t guessing at what they’d respond to.
However, what made it harder was how Microdot’s work spans across a wide range of contexts. An A24 film and a North Face campaign require very different framing. The identity needed to flex across all of that without becoming generic. That demanded restraint. Every element had to justify itself, and we had to resist the temptation to overdesign.
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