“If you are going to design and build online experiences for your clients, you better have one of the best damn websites out there. Kudos to Huge for revamping its online home.” —juror Ginny Golden
“You see immediately that this company understands and cares deeply about design. A smart and confident sales tool.” —juror Winston Binch
Overview: The credo at Huge has long been “Less, but better.” In 2014, it was time to apply this principle of simplicity to the design of Huge’s own brand. The firm introduced a refined design system, a new logo and a reengineered website. The elements are all based on a simple grid, which forms the framework for the new website. The focus of the new hugeinc.com is the work: the blood, sweat and tears that define the firm.
• It took a team of roughly 20 people from across Huge—with a core team of about eight—around six months to redesign and develop the site.
• The team used Node.js and Express.js for rapid prototyping, and the site runs on ASP.NET MVC on top of Sitecore 7.\
• The redesigned hugeinc.com has served nearly a million unique users since launch.
Comments by Jon Jackson:
What was the purpose of the project? “Huge’s website consistently sets new industry standards, but it had been a few years since we had redesigned it. During this time, the way people were accessing the web had been changing rapidly, and our site no longer lived up to our own expectations for how a site should work across devices. We wanted to evolve hugeinc.com in a way that would push industry standards forward again and serve as a platform for our own experimentation.”
What was the thinking behind the navigation structure? “We wanted to keep the focus on our work without having to resort to using a standard homepage carousel. We designed the homepage to put our own H shaped spotlight on a continually updated gallery of the work we’re most proud of. A gallery of H-shapes appears across several slides, each occupying the entire screen. We abandoned traditional scrolling because allowing the bottom half of one slide to appear with the top half of another would have undermined the intended experience.”
What was the most challenging aspect of the project? “Carving out enough time for the team to work on it. The year 2014 has been our busiest yet, so everyone who was working on the site was also simultaneously working hard on challenging client projects. Some weeks we could only spare a few hours, so we had to be flexible and prioritize. It was really a passion project undertaken by people who love Huge and who wanted to push the site as hard as we could. This was a case of really being able to let loose, experiment freely and let the design take shape over time, which is how we like to work.”
