Responses by John Pobojewski, partner and design director, Span.

Background: Edited by architect and curator Iker Gil, multimedia design platform MAS Context offers one of the foremost presentations of design culture in practice, presenting multiple perspectives on the overlapping worlds of design, architecture and urbanism. Since its establishment, MAS Context has become a global design media channel of events, lectures, panel discussions, art exhibitions, published artist monographs and a semi-annual journal for which it’s renowned. We were commissioned to design a new online platform for MAS Context that expands the international reach of all the organization’s dimensions and highlights the different types of content it produces.

Larger picture: We also designed a new identity for MAS Context. The new mark is influenced by the seminal De Stijl movement of the early 1920s, integrating a visible structure into the letterforms that evolves from the underlying grid structure of the previous logo.

Design core: Our design weaves MAS Context’s celebration of typography and graphic design found within its published work into the new website, using four display typefaces and two type schemes throughout for both visual impact and greater flexibility in editorial voice. The neutral color palette emphasizes the editorial content, but as users scroll through the site, the theme inverts from light to dark to grab interest and group content together.

New lessons: The biggest lessons we learned were creating a strong reading experience for long-form content such as articles and observations. This became the emphasis of the entire platform, making the experience easy on any device and enabling greater accessibility for the content that MAS Context produces to be read and experienced by anyone visiting the site.

Navigation structure: The pop-out navigation expands as needed to highlight live search results or provide structure within a current issue, always directing visitors to new content and MAS Context’s editorial focus.

Technology: Built on the Craft CMS platform, MAS Context’s new platform is responsive, flexible and typographically rich for multiple forms of editorial content, from long-form essays with citations to audio interviews and photo essays. The site has seamless transitions between pages using the barba.js framework and custom JavaScript.