Responses by Jesper Fagerlund, creative director, Granyon

Background: The site promotes the work of The Decarceration Collective and the Buried Alive Project. They are fighting to free human beings that have been locked away for life due to minor drug-related offenses based on the three-strikes law in the United States. The site shares a few of the personal stories of people affected by the law told in their own voice from inside prison. We aim to raise the attention to this problem.

Video content: The fact that these are real stories told with the voices of real people that are normally kept away from any public contact—not allowed to have their voices heard in any other way—makes this project very special. It is authentic and straight on. We wanted to engender the feeling of what it would be like to be locked away and give a sense of how many people this actually affects.

Challenges: The project changed perspective during the construction of the site—as a movie got funded for the same cause—so we wanted to take advantage and help generate buzz. We had plenty of time but not a big budget, and there were elements we wanted to include that would have required additional specialist resources. There are so many ways to make interesting interactive solutions, and we would love to do it all again in different ways. But time passes quickly, and it was just finished in time to launch. We are very happy with the end result.

Navigation design: The way you navigate the “space” with inmates’ stories is intended to be expandable, keeping room for many more stories than just the 14 highlighted at the moment. Everything else is basically scrolling and a simple burger style menu. On mobile, the navigation is reduced to a scroll overview as gyro movement to navigate was deemed too experimental here. The most important function is to get the stories out.

Technology: Everything is based on the Webflow CMS with some custom code to enhance the experience of video, sound and other features. Using Webflow enabled us to experiment more and incorporate user feedback for a longer period than would have been possible with a traditional design-to-development process.