Responses by Davide Cristini, creative developer; Fabio Minerva, creative director; Nicolò Pierotti, head of front-end development; and Sebastiano Pierotti, art director, AQuest.

Background: The site was created to extend Deep Beauty, a cultural project for Italian beauty brand KIKO Milano, into a digital experience. Conceived by Ogilvy Italia, the exhibition explores the evolution of beauty through the work of great artists. It invites users to challenge stereotypes and embrace diverse perspectives across six themed rooms that feature more than 60 impactful photographs and installations.

Larger picture: At the physical show at the Milan-based museum Mudec Photo, visitors could scan a QR code to access the site and unlock audio guides and extended content for each artwork, seamlessly linking the physical and digital experiences. While not a traditional promotional campaign, the project serves as a strategic brand investment in culture, reinforcing KIKO’s emotional positioning and offering a bold, long-term platform for brand engagement through artistic exploration.

Design core: The UI was kept minimal to spotlight the photography. The digital space deliberately diverged from the physical setup, evoking a dreamlike, aseptic atmosphere where the artworks truly stand out. The experience is defined by a careful balance between editorial elegance and digital fluidity: expressive typography, refined color palettes, subtle interactions, and a narrative structure that guides users through an exploratory journey.

A key visual element is the brushstroke effect from the exhibition’s print campaign, which we reimagined digitally as a brush that follows the cursor. This interactive feature appears throughout the site, from the homepage to exhibition room, creating visual continuity between the campaign and the digital experience.

Favorite details: From a technical perspective, one of our greatest achievements was reaching the visual quality we aimed for in the rendering of the exhibition rooms, while ensuring that the artworks remained fully accessible and easy to navigate—both on desktop and mobile—within a 3-D environment.

We’re especially proud of the seamless integration of visual storytelling and microinteractions: fluid scroll animations, the brush-like custom cursor, finely tuned transitions and a poetic use of sound all contribute to a multisensory experience, which is rare for a beauty brand website. The mobile-first approach didn’t compromise the narrative depth; instead, it made it more accessible and immersive across every device.

Challenges: Creating a smooth and visually appealing 3-D virtual exposition without loading screens between rooms. Many devices struggle with large, detailed scenes. We relied on a range of internal solutions we’ve developed over the years: custom asset pipelines, baked lighting, dynamic visibility systems and tools to quickly optimize 3-D assets with modern and open compression formats like KTX2 and Draco.

Special navigational features: Users can explore each exhibition room freely with no interruptions or loading screens. Unlike traditional web navigation with frequent page loads, we engineered a fully dynamic infinite scroll system that manages room positions in real-time, delivering a seamless and immersive experience across the entire virtual space.

Technology: Deep Beauty is built on our custom starter framework, developed over time using Next.js, React Three Fiber, tailwindcss and three.js. Then, we rely on other important tools in our pipeline, one of which is Blender: our 3-D team used it to model environments and objects, while the front-end team used it to prototype and plan user navigation, including the infinite scroll logic.