The new Grip Limited site presents the work of this Toronto-based advertising agency in a playful and engaging way. Gracefully scaling to fill large displays, the site mixes campaign case studies, reels and agency info with bizarre employee facts, dense typography, rambling copy and scratch-able radio spots.

Coping with huge amounts of video and other content presented one of the biggest challenges both in developing the site and in ensuring optimal performance. Because all of the content is available on a single screen, a carefully orchestrated system of managing the display chain was necessary.

Content is presented in a series of collapsible columns, which users scroll through horizontally and vertically. A number of navigation options (from a mouse scroll wheel and keyboard arrow keys, to a hidden menu) were included to ensure that the unorthodox structure would still be intuitive and easy to use.

• The site was built in ActionScript 3 and published in Flash 10. Intrinsic limitations of Flash around memory resources were overcome through mindful “garbage collection” of the video assets.

• In addition to being completely modular—new work is added as a new column—custom work selections are easily created for pitches and prospective clients, and published under separate URLs.

• “Grip Facts” are populated through an XML file generated by an internal employee survey that new employees take when they join the studio (answers are automatically removed from the database when someone leaves).

* The Grip blog column is fed through an RSS feed from the agency’s official blog—thebigorangeslide.com.

* The site is also displayed on a large touch-enabled iMac in the agency’s lobby; the dragging interface is perfectly suited to the touchscreen environment.