Responses by Valeria Francis, digital designer.

Background: This website was created as a noncommercial student project. The target audience for the project comprises art directors and fellow designers. Its main purpose is to tell the story of the fashion brand Off-White and Virgil Abloh—the man behind the brand and a truly inspirational figure—in a unique way by combining storytelling with visual metaphors and by showcasing my design skills as well.

Design core: Off-White as a brand and Virgil as the mastermind behind it were the main influences on the site’s style: combining and mixing elements from different backgrounds, looking to the core of things and finding the metaphor that would give new layers to each object. In my opinion, the visual metaphor is the main element of the website, which helps tell the story not only through the text itself but through images and animation, creating interaction and communicating with the user. Leaving an impression on the viewer is what I am most proud of achieving with this website.

Challenges: Selecting and structuring the information onto the final sitemap. Off-White is rich with collaborations and achievements, and the life story of Virgil Abloh is fascinating. The number of articles about him and the brand is just overwhelming. Also, each part of the long read is replete with elements and details, so creating a mobile version for this website was my personal challenge!

Divergent paths: I would revisit the typography of the website. I’m happy with the font selection of Gosha Sans and Neue Bit from Pangram Pangram, as I think these represent the dynamics and zeitgeist of the brand perfectly. But looking at the website now, I think I could work with them better.

New lessons: This was my first time creating and developing a website by myself. I used the Tilda Publishing platform with some additional code. My main realization was that with Tilda, you can create freely and bring to life anything you want much more quickly and painlessly.

Navigation structure: The website is a one-page long read with elements separated into “chapters.” The idea was to show Off-White’s linear story from the beginning of the brand to the present day. Even though the page is quite long, I did not want to separate it into different pages but rather bring the user straight from point A to point B. To help with page navigation, I added a burger menu.

Technology: As I said above, I used the no-code platform Tilda Publishing with a bit of touch of code for some elements of the website. I think it is an excellent solution for many websites as you can develop your projects much more quickly and effectively.