Responses by Nicole Jaffe, designer/web developer/illustrator and Roman Jaster, cofounder, Yay Brigade

Background: The website was created to celebrate women who were trailblazers in the field of American architecture. Since women are generally underrepresented in the architecture world, this website aims to showcase their contributions, through in-depth scholarly essays on each of the women, going all the way back to the late 1800s.

Highlights: The navigation and the focus on typographic hierarchy. For the essays, it was important for us to treat the typography with the utmost consideration. We aimed for a “print sensibility,” all the while fully utilizing the web. We even wrote a few lines of JavaScript to prevent typographic widows from disturbing the aesthetic flow.

Challenges: The most challenging aspect of the site was figuring out how to make the essays enticing and readable. Since the essays are quite dense and fairly long with numerous footnotes as well as biographical information, we had to figure out how to make this information accessible to scholars, while also making it “cool.” We achieved this by employing dramatic scale shifts and surprising compositional arrangements.

Favorite details: The subtle animations throughout the intro sequence and the transition of the menu from landing to the essays; the hover effect on the chronological view of the menu; the seamless, viewport-appropriate transformation of the layout from big to small screens; and the small moments of surprise and details. For example, when transitioning from the landing to the essay pages, the word “Women” in the title switches to “Woman” via a sly animation of the e to an a.

Navigational structure: We were keen to figure out different ways of accessing the essays, which led to the categorization of the “table of contents” into alphabetical, chronological and pictorial listings. The chronological view also shows readers how the lives of the women overlapped over time. And it works surprisingly well in a mobile context.

Anything new: On this site, once the page is downloaded from the server, all the subsequent server requests are made via Javascript calls. This AJAX-like experience makes the navigation of the site feel very snappy, and there’s very little to no lag time when accessing new pages.