Responses by Jassica Bouvier, associate strategy director; Mike Byrne, interface director; Benoit Lemoine, associate design director; and Mark Jarecke, managing director, AREA 17.

Background: OXMAN—a hybridized design, technology and research company started by MIT professor-turned-entrepreneur Neri Oxman—reimagines how humanity and nature interact in industry. We created a brand that positions the company as a first-of-its-kind, nature-centric design practice, defining a new type of industry that galvanizes people around a future-forward, sustainable world. The site speaks to nature itself, the design and scientific communities, collaborating companies and clients, activists, future talent, and the media—all the arenas in which OXMAN plays and positions itself as a driver of innovation.

Design core: The system is elegantly simple, with a black-and-white color palette and a precise grid designed to animate the sublime and evocative images of work created by the OXMAN team. We looked to nature, the most awe-inspiring muse, to visually bring this brand to life. From a technical point of view, we seized opportunities to integrate specific data points and paired them with technical graphics to illuminate each project’s methodology and innovation. Finally, the OXMAN story is revealed in layers as visitors scroll down the homepage, reflecting the multifaceted nature of its work that spans the disciplines of design, science, architecture and bioengineering.

Favorite details: The OXMAN team comprises a radically diverse group of designers, scientists, engineers and architects who all have one thing in common: an insatiable curiosity motivated by the pursuit of the unknown. On the website, we leaned into this mindset by embedding moments of surprise that call on the visitor to interact with the company, projects and careers through Easter egg features like hover effects and hidden videos.

Challenges: The OXMAN story is complex. For visitors to truly understand it, it needed to be told in a simplified yet evocative way that would draw them into the brand instead of overwhelming them with information. Our work on the brand platform was foundational to achieving this goal. Once we aligned OXMAN’s purpose, position and values, we meticulously designed the online experience to embody the brand in every detail.

Technology: The site is powered by a Laravel PHP application with content entry using Twill, the open-source CMS we developed. The front-end display uses modularized Blade PHP templates styled using SCSS. The interactivity is handled by JavaScript using A17 Behaviors, an open-source JavaScript interactions framework developed by us. The codebase is stored within our secure GitLab code repository, and a GitLab CI/CD pipeline handles deployment to remote servers.