Responses by brand.new.

Background: brand.new is an award-winning design agency located in Athens, Greece. The new website is a portfolio that showcases our most important projects. Our target audience is clients, designers and people interested in design around the world.

Design core: Our basic creative approach was to create a bold, unique portfolio page with vivid typography, an interactive feel and a simple interface that adapts to any device. Interactive typography was essential to us since we wanted to create a dynamic connection between the visual and verbal worlds, a feature in the creative process we uphold in general as a studio. Also, we increased the role of the day/night mode theme to affect content besides the main UI wherever possible.

Challenges: We faced many during the process, both in the design and the development parts. The whole project is based on several novelties never seen by us on similar websites. We had numerous betas test the site until the back end supported all the dynamic features properly and the front end ran smoothly. To offer a quick experience, we had to bypass established methods, like using available plugins for multilanguage support in WordPress—this would have forced the whole webpage to reload when switching languages and added unnecessary load time to the server. This whole experience was valuable to us as creating a completely custom-made website is a territory we now know better.

Navigation structure: The navigation structure does not vary from a typical portfolio page, yet our interface specifications for a human-scale UI and experience affected specific choices. For example, in order to achieve instant bilingual changes, we used a toggle. When used efficiently in the navigation system and user interface, toggle switches offer a swift experience while minimizing space, a particular benefit for a portfolio website on devices with a smaller screen sizes.

Special features: On touchscreen devices, the interface utilizes a simplistic, human-scaled UI, which we believe offers a struggle-free navigation experience.

Technology: The site was developed by digital agency eeriee with the latest features of HTML5 and CSS3, as well as the latest version of JQuery to offer the user an improved, simpler navigation experience. We chose WordPress for the CMS because it is easy to use and provides hundreds of APIs. Finally, we used Elementor Pro to create pages for projects. Thanks to this, we reduced the pages’ creation time to a minimum while achieving our desired results.