Responses by Sean Jones, design director, Maven.

Background: We had just gone through the process of developing the brand identity for Breaking, a bioengineering company dedicated to breaking down plastic waste. We kept things under wraps until we finished the site. It went live in tandem with this article. The site launched as the company went public. There was a media plan to announce Breaking and the amazing discovery for the very first time.

Design core: We wanted the site to be energetic. This brand is meant to inspire people and create a belief we can fix the plastic issues. It needed to be attractive but also reveal hard truths about problems our planet faces—eye catching and purposeful.

Favorite details: The overall “feel” of the scroll experience, which is dynamic and fluid without being confusing or chaotic, as well as the typography and pixelation. We worked really hard to provide playful animation and visuals with dense facts and scientific data.

Challenges: The level of interaction, animation and video was tricky considering we were under a time crunch.

Time constraints: We slowly released a few updates over the month following  to get things optimized. The entire pixel trash interaction on the homepage was launched a month later.

Alternate paths: We would have loved to incorporate more interactive pixelation hover states. Some decisions we made to use video loops were a product of maybe not as much time to create things with code.

Navigation structure: The full menu dropdown was important. As you can tell, we leverage some pretty expressive, chaotic graphics and video content on the site. The clean white nav menu upon clicking the menu button was a nice break, making it easy to get to the other pages.