Responses by Yu Shigematsu, director, Shhh.

Background: Analogue Foundation is a creative collective founded in 2016 by world-renowned engineer and producer Russell Elevado; the Soundwalk Collective, an advanced contemporary sonic arts platform; and Audio-Technica, a company dedicated to high-quality sound and music experiences. This website introduces the activities of the Analogue Foundation, and its target audience includes musicians, DJs, sound engineers, music professionals, music lovers and others who find joy in high-quality analog experiences.

Design core: For the design, we focused on the keywords authenticity, dignity, elegance and Japanese-Western fusion, which are fundamental to the Analogue Foundation brand. The core of the design was to embody the appearance of the brand through the use of characters that combine ligatures and script typefaces.

This website is designed all around text. Therefore, by applying ligature typography to the letters, we adopted an approach that emphasizes respect for the letters, their beauty and authenticity, to create a character for the site.

In addition, the layout utilizes a flowing margin space between the text and images to create a curvaceous, oriental sensibility of elegance. By combining a subtle color scheme that evokes a sense of depth, the overall design is a blend of Japanese and Western influences that opens up the senses while maintaining a sense of elegance, which is what we wanted to achieve for the brand.

Navigation structure: Prior to our website redesign, the Analogue Foundation’s activities were scattered across various categories, which made it difficult to convey the organization’s overall picture and the purpose of its activities. We consolidated these activities under the label “Experiences” and reorganized the information structure.

In the global navigation, we carefully chose words such as voice instead of interview, listen instead of vinyl and tape, and other words that would connect to the analog human senses.

Technology: The back end uses Newt, a headless CMS, and the front end was template-coded in Vite and integrated with the back end using Astro.

We used barba.js for page transitions, Lenis for scroll easing, Splide for basic sliders, and other animations and functions we created by ourselves using CSS and vanilla JavaScript.