Responses by Headless Horse.

Background: The site serves as full-service design studio Headless Horse’s main portfolio. Our goal was to present our work to prospective and current clientele in a manner that communicates our passion for creating unique experiences online and offline.

We try to keep our communications and online footprint tight, so we were careful to create an experience that told the narrative of the studio while remaining secretive enough to warrant exploration and encourage people to dive deeper into the website.

Design features: The core design of our brand is monochromatic, drawn from systems that feel like they’re adopted in both form and style. We get inspired by structures found in government paperwork, faxes, computer archives and typewriters.

The main feature is a photographic wall of all our projects and explorations. Each photograph is an interaction point where, by moving your cursor around the wall, you can discover the title of case files in the form of small tooltips. Once selected, a window-like modal opens up full-length case studies.

Challenges: Self-initiated projects have no real deadline, so the most challenging aspect was actually finishing the project. It was important to set a key launch date and to tell our partners of that date; it kept us to a deadline and enabled for a smooth release and promotion across our platforms.

The toughest aspect of the creation of the site was future proofing the system. We wanted to develop a site that could be updated in the future, so the site’s back end makes adding new projects rather straightforward. The benefit of having to retake the photograph of the wall of objects for each big update is that the site is completely transformed by replacing a single image, whether it’s a new location, replacing old work with new or changing the artistic direction.

Navigation structure: We wanted users to feel like they were investigating our work and taking time to really discover each project. The wall of photography drew inspiration directly from “investigation walls,” like in the detectives’ offices in movies. By covering the wall from floor to ceiling with images and evidence, we wanted users to spend time on our site, investigating Headless Horse’s body of work.

We designed the exploratory work page to showcase all past works together in equal hierarchy from single-image outcomes to full 360-degree projects. Headless Horse looks to meld modern and traditional processes; we communicated this through employing the use of a still-life that features past works from imagery, sculpture and other studio properties.

Technology: We built the site primarily with simple HTML and CSS. We used JavaScript and some jQuery for the main work page and initial booting screen. On the work page, clicking on projects triggers a link to the case studies to be displayed in an iframe inside of a modal styled after a retro window. The case studies were all built externally on a separate platform, which enabled us to have each case study vary in style and appearance, as each project has unique content and branding.