Laying new foundations
Robert A.M. Stern Architects came to us in summer 2019 to help them launch a new part of their website that they were calling the Storyboard. RAMSA’s research team had written the backstories of six different projects, taking the reader through their firm’s thinking and work from start to finish. We loved the material and jumped in to help set up a system that would let them publish it.
Given the quality of the content - beautiful pictures, wonderful writing - our goal was to get out of the way as much as possible. To do that, we embraced minimalism, cutting down on standard web bells and whistles and letting RAMSA’s photos be the sole source of color.
SERVICES
design
development
systems architecture
drupal
animation
creative direction
Elevating with animation
Though we wanted to let the content speak for itself, we also saw an opportunity to increase its impact with the gentle application of some animation. Specifically, we designed a special “fade-in” effect for images & text as they loaded. This provides a little extra visual interest on the page. But more importantly, it gives the content some much-needed breathing space - the images are typically extremely large in these stories and otherwise threaten to overwhelm.
An easy editing experience
Neither our team nor RAMSA’s wanted every story to look the same - their format should adapt to the content rather than the other way around. So instead of designing a page template, we took the six initial stories and laid them out with the RAMSA research team. Once that was done, we designed and built the elements that we’d need to create those stories on the web. This gave RAMSA future flexibility - those blocks can be rearranged however they see fit as they post new stories.