Responses by BASIC
Background: We relocated our HQ to the emerging cultural center Makers Quarter in San Diego, California. To tell this story to potential hires, CMOs and the local creative community, we called on our developers and designers to help craft an experience unlike anything BASIC has ever done. We wanted to challenge our team to experiment with unfamiliar design methodologies and completely rethink how we communicate narratives by blurring the lines between documentary, editorial and digital. The site was the main piece of our office and company expansion campaign; it broke down the space and our surrounding community, and accompanying blog and social posts introduced the move and directed traffic toward our site.
Highlights: We wanted this experience to feel intimate and personal, akin to inviting guests into our physical office. Quotes and photography sourced from various team members add a layer of familiarity and authenticity, and bold typography reflects the daring nature of our move to Makers Quarter. Across the site, users are greeted with a splash of pastel pink, countering BASIC’s signature black seen throughout our visual identity system. Visual aside, sound is also used throughout the site in the form of video narration, background music and testimonial voiceovers for a full sensory experience.
Favorite details: Aside from the motion design and animation we spent hours trying to perfect, one painstaking detail we’re proud of is at the end of the experience. Without giving away too much, our senior designer Arthur Armenta did some amazing work using just a static image.
Navigational structure: Moves® is divided into five distinct sections—an introduction and four subsequent chapters. Splitting them up this way was a deliberate decision. We wanted our experience to, quite literally, tell the story from pre-construction to current and future endeavors in our space. Pink wipe and white fill on site headers contribute to the site’s progressive motion, while a dynamic cursor guides our users through the experience—enabling them to move between pages, enlarge images and play and pause audio/video throughout various points.