Responses by Pranjal Kaila, creative lead and senior designer.

Background: By offering bioalternative products to the ones we use in our daily lives, ZeroCircle helps conscious brands go carbon-neutral and enables organizations to create perfectly circular solutions, leaving nothing behind. The brand makes a zero-waste lifestyle accessible, achievable and actionable.

We were tasked to design the identity of the brand along with a website that would strongly bring forth the wondrous, transformative qualities of ZeroCircle’s core material: seaweed. The goal of the site is to showcase the potential of our oceans’ natural regenerative resource to ambitious brands searching to innovate and switch to biomaterials.

Design core: Amorphous, abundant seaweed acts as the hero of our design for ZeroCircle. The countless species of marine algae will shape the future of sustainable packaging, slowly but steadily diffusing global concerns such as climate change and food scarcity. The website’s design subtly captures the silhouette and natural motion of seaweed, distinguished by colorful background transitions, variable typefaces and contrasting illustration styles to express the metamorphic qualities of seaweed.

Favorite details: Playing with variable fonts created the feeling of a living, breathing organism, and it turned out quite well. I’m also fond of the Materials page; it lists the qualities of seaweed as a material, and as you scroll further and go deeper, the background gets darker, simulating the color of the ocean and effectively capturing the environs of the raw material. I think it’s a pretty neat visual cue. Last but not least, I am quite pleased with the headlines we wrote.

Challenges: We worked closely with the client to develop the visual story and the written content simultaneously in an immensely tight timeframe. The most challenging aspect of the site was to create a meaningful viewing experience without showing the actual product, as it is still in development and has to be kept under wraps until the final reveal.

Time constraints: We had a crucial deadline of two weeks that could not be pushed because of an investor’s meeting that was a huge deal for our client. The time constraint kept us on the edge and demanded quick, functional decisions from us. We lucked out by having a great client who gave pointed feedback and trusted us.

New lessons: We experimented a lot with variable typefaces to create dramatic headlines, though most of the experiments did not make it to the live version.

Navigation structure: It was vital to effectively tell the story of seaweed, its properties and how it’s sourced. But we also wanted to ensure that viewers had easy access to all the content with a single click. For that, we crosslinked all the pages in different paragraphs.

Technology: We based the website on the Semplice theme running on WordPress, combined with some custom CSS and JavaScript code to create microinteractions and a delightful experience.