Responses by Hideki Muramatsu, producer/art director/designer, QuoitWorks

Background: dep Management is a visual creator collective that manages creators, like photographers, digital artists and motion graphic designers, who cherish the process in which images are created and presented. dep Management is named after the first three letters of the word departure, which symbolizes how the work goes out into the world. dep endeavors to deliver works with progress and innovation. I helped organize the site so that users can quickly see the wonderful achievements of all the creators on the site.

Highlights: We consider “the speed of information acquisition” as our most important element. As we believe that “form should follow function,” we arranged it so the animation moves quickly to capture users’ attention.

Challenges: Our goal was to have users move around quickly to see whom the creators are, but we didn’t want to rank them on the site in any order. To resolve this problem, we created a list of all the creators under dep Management, whose works are highlighted with the rollover UI. Also, every time the page loads, the list order of creators on the homepage switches.

Navigational structure: I used two different types. The first one follows the site’s hierarchy. The second one consists of a drawer menu that appears when the sitemap opens. These navigational features come from the idea of “giving freedom to users” and both are the “easiest to use.”

Technical features: I only used Javascript and CSS, since I believed that the “idea” is more important.

Anything new: I learned about discovery glitch effects. Although this is not a new technological feature, I learned how these effects could give an old site “quite a novel impression,” depending on the correct judgment and usage.