Responses by Jesse Mallon, associate design director, Studio Brave

Background: Studio Brave is a branding and design studio in Melbourne, Australia. With sixteen years of experience, we work across a broad range of sectors—spanning arts and culture, corporate, property, hospitality, retail and more. Completed as part of a recently completed studio rebrand, the website showcases an extensive and diverse body of work. It is primarily targeted at prospective clients, but also aims to engage potential creative collaborators, as well as fellow designers.

Highlights: A single typeface and a single color have been used across the site, ensuring a restrained, confident aesthetic, reflecting the studio’s brand and making the projects themselves the primary focus. A number of subtle design elements, such as the cursor and rollovers, encourage exploration throughout the site.

Challenges: Completing any type of work for ourselves always comes with added challenges, including the pressure of wanting to exceed expectations. The lack of client-imposed deadlines came with the benefit of being able to refine the site design until we were completely happy, but also resulted in a lengthy design process.

Favorite details: Keeping the layout and navigation as intuitive as possible, while still creating something unique and engaging.

Navigational structure: Navigation across the site was kept as simple as possible. Users are encouraged to view multiple projects, with each project leading seamlessly into the next with an animated transition.

Anything new: Content creation was a large portion of the development phase of the site, which included engaging photographers and filmmakers like production company SIRAP Motion Lab to document the studio’s practice. The implementation of film and animation across the site created a number of opportunities and hurdles, which had the design team thinking further outside of the confines of static digital design.