Responses by Martin Sanne Kristiansen, designer/developer/partner, Heydays

Background: Sponsored by Thames & Hudson Publishers, Volume offers an alternative publishing model for creating, financing, producing and selling high quality printed and illustrated books. By redefining the role of the publisher and the relationship between creator and reader, Volume aims to produce books of uncompromising standards for dedicated audiences.

Highlights: We wanted the visual identity for the site to reflect the merging of the digital and the physical world. References to print production are brought in with crop marks, tinted color stops for the funding bars, and the logo mark itself. The site’s visual framework has been kept to a strict black/white/gray color tone, giving room for visual explorations and expressive color themes for each project and product.

Challenges: The biggest challenge was building the crowdfunding platform and initially being unaware of all the odds and ends of the process. Also, the website needed to have its own web shop working in tangent with the crowdfunding platform, which further complicated the site’s structure.

Favorite details: In addition to cofounding Volume with publisher Lucas Dietrich, editor Darren Wall also handled all the site content. He’s a great graphic designer and we believe he has done a beautiful job creating the project presentations. We’re happy to have made a tool that is not only flexible, but also rigid enough to always feel like a part of the site.

Anything new: Having never built any crowdfunding platforms, we started out with Wordpress and WooCommerce as our basis. With WooCommerce, we were able to handle all the custom email communication, project pages, account pages and admin settings, which, thanks to its easy template structure, made the site infrastructure cleaner and easier to maintain.

Technical features: I would have to say the logo animation, which is a nice little detail animated with the help of anime.js. The website is still in its early stages, but once there is more activity users will see the statistical numbers being counted live as people start pledging.