Responses by Jonathan Morin, designer and founder, Jomor Design.

Background: Northand Films wanted me to create a quality portfolio website that equaled the quality of video productions it makes. The goal was to show people a good time while showcasing its work. We needed it to be a true representation of the company—and what it’s all about—that would then seduce the marketing crowd, agencies or brands. So rather than building your typical portfolio website, we opted for a different approach: something that people could actually pay attention to and get excited about.

Favorite details: I think what got us most excited and ended up being our biggest pride—aside from the videos themselves—was the entire homepage. We wanted it to set the tone right off the bat and use that introduction to tickle our visitors and create some intrigue; basically, we were looking to amuse them with an unusual first impression. We acknowledged and appreciated the idea of having that possible confusion prior to the initial scrolling taking place.

Challenges: From a design standpoint, a big challenge (even though it isn’t unique to this project) was to get people to actually pay attention and care about what we’re presenting. We feel like we did a pretty successful job there. From a more technical standpoint, having a lot of videos always slows everything down, so working with that in mind was a nice challenge to orchestrate the navigation in a way that doesn’t break the flow or disturb the experience.

Navigation structure: Since the very start, we knew we didn’t want to build a standard marketing website with a regular navigation. Much like Northand Films’s way of doing things, we wanted the navigation to be some sort of adventure: with no specific agenda in mind, simply moving through the site while taking it all in. That is why we open with a piece of advice: “Take your time.” We wanted our visitors to be in “exploration mode” and enjoy the moment.

Technology: This site was created with Webflow, an amazing “no-code” tool. It has limitations, yes, but using it to try and push the envelope is what makes it fun to me. For a creative and original project like this one, the exploration process happens pretty much everywhere at once. Static mockups, prototyping, visual development, QA and user testing end up all blending together—for me at least.