Responses by Nick de Jardine; designer, developer, strategist and founder; Grafik.

Background: Convicts are a New York City–, Los Angeles– and Australia-based production company that tells stories about character, movements brands and ideas making the right kind of trouble in culture. Its audience includes commercial clients and a growing audience that watches its original content.

Part of the website brief was to merge two separate websites into one, bringing originals and commercial work under the one banner. The site merges these two worlds and exposes them to each other while also evolving Convicts’s online brand.

Design core: The website’s look is less, but just enough. We combined this with playful interactivity and unexpected design moments.

Favorite details: Mixing Signifier with Söhne perfectly achieved the rebellious but contemporary feel that we wanted to articulate. Also, the content leans heavily on the Vimeo API. It may not be obvious, but all videos are served from Vimeo in a custom video player using its player.js.

Challenges: Load times on mobile, as well as deciding to cut back on from the desktop while still maintaining the experience. The deadline was fairly loose, so we were afforded the freedom to experiment and prototype.

Divergent paths: Some of the newsletters are run through JavaScript. We probably should have done them on the server side.

New paradigms: The Vimeo API is awesome.

Navigation structure: The main inspiration for the hero menu is taken from the typography seen on protest signage. In order to follow this, we had to make it large, typographic and full screen.

Technology: ES6 JavaScript, GSAP, Webpack and WordPress as the CMS.

Special features: The canvas animation on the About page, the subtle parallax of the content columns, and the main menu animation and “ticker” hover.