Responses by Cause+Affect; Denim & Steel

Background: The website is the online home for Vancouver, Canada–based brand consultancy Cause+Affect. Vancouver, Canada–based software company, Denim & Steel, also helped with the site’s design. The Cause+Affect site reflects its refined talent and experience helping socially conscious, culturally dynamic businesses, organizations and institutions.

Highlights: The case studies are the most important feature of the site and are built to ensure that each project can be presented as part of a larger group of work while also ensuring that its unique aspects stand out. The most eye-catching feature, however, is the section focus when the user clicks on it.

Challenges: Partway through the project, it became clear that the core concept of the site created an overly complex user experience, which took away from the key content focus. Rebuilding on top of the same technical structure became a challenge that was both frustrating and exhilarating.

Favorite details: The entire site has a great balance between unexpected interaction, concise navigation, performance and visual richness. It’s rare to see all these aspects work together harmoniously.

Time constraints: Cause+Affect was willing to allow time for exploration, experimentation and to take a step back when something didn’t seem right. Choosing to launch “when ready” rather than forge ahead and hit a specific date did mean things moved slower than normal, but the results were worth the wait.

Technical features: The site is a hybrid of Craft CMS and a custom Ember app, which is how we managed to balance large images with a very fast performance.