Websites worth waking up to: Forging a future of beautiful digital environments | Base Design

[Applause] thank you Elizabeth thank you everyone thank you for coming that was quite an introduction um let's see if I can bit that I am Mir Nissen b and a few years back I was flying to San Francisco and in front of me in the line to board was Sergey Brin uh the founder of Google yeah I was not even in the first class and the gentleman who was at the end of the jetway looked at him very intently and said wait I think I know who you are you are the guy that makes websites

and Sergey without a second of hesitation looked back and said yep I'm the guy I make websites and I just found it so simple a way to describe what I do so I use the quote I make websites I come to do this work in a bit of a roundabout way I was I come from Eastern Europe where I studied Fine Art and art history and then moved to us in the 80s some of you may remember that and I went to the art school here and in US Art School the first thing I found

was a computer lab and we had access to the to the mac and if you had access to the mac and you could turn it on you actually back then could get a job that was enough of a qualification and so I got the job and that's what that looked like I was doing newspaper layouts in page man maker few of you in the audience may actually know what that is and so you can now age me and understand the time Gap yeah that was long ago and it was very boring and then there was

flash now few more of you may know what that was and that was uh a technology that was allowing us to sort of Break Free from the limitations of the browser and the early HTML protocols to start doing fun things and so for me it was a magic moment I could now start combining my interest in self-expression with new technology to actually make things that are fun beautiful and eventually getting into the web and having to learn how to do things that are useful as well now today I'm a partner at Bas design a you

probably all know the firm we're brand focused creative firm and we're still obsessed with how to make projects beautiful and useful no longer though how now to express myself but the brands we work with so here is just a quick trailer of the work that we actually do at base [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now at base we don't see web as an executional deliverable rather as an important piece of brand expression and overall experience to simplify it a bit if the strategy is all about the

ideas and then visual identity is the kind of a system to deliver these ideas then the web is the first place where these ideas actually come to life and so I'd like to talk about the web today there are approximately six websites that are launched every second at least Google said so so and that means a few dozens have been launched since I started speaking with such speed of creation there is inevitably an evolution of the medium from digital Commerce of the early days to Crazy e-commerce of today from index to search to the Fantastic

products that we use online today from online papers and books to to online only media unfortunately part of this Evolution has been the standardization and the homogenization look at these four you'd be forgiven to think that they are actually variations of the same idea of the same brand they're not they are four distinct separate websites they simply follow Trends they follow patterns they all informative they state which worlds they belong to I'm in coffee business I'm in crypto I'm fashion e-commerce what they don't say is who they TR truly are what makes them special they

touch no emotions they leave no memories they don't really give people any reasons to come back except for the very functional ones often this is defended by the idea of user friendliness probably propagated by the guys like me a few years back everything should look familiar and to make it easy to use that became a mantra that became kind of the objective of the design overall this approach in my mind though changes the role of the designers to become almost decorators web skinners take the wires apply the Styles move boxes to the left image on

the right no image on the left text on the right values at the top apply brand typography system and then the color on top of it design is ready but really is it is this why we chose this profession question is this even worth waking up for I want us to create extraordinary well the good news is that in the sea of sameness there will always be organizations there will always be people that want to stand out they will want to innovate that need is not going away and I think that's an opportunity for those

of us who are willing to go the extra mile so let's talk a little bit about extraordinary web what's interesting about that is that all the extr or or all the extraordinary online experiences actually have common traits they project a very strong self sense of self very distinct personality these two amazing Ecom couldn't be farther apart from each other or from the generic eom approach is so prevalent today these two project confidence they push boldly the standards and through that they able to communicate so much more than the generic portfolios could EXT ordinary sites are

distinct in form and in function they exume passion Charisma energy they don't shy away from who they are they tell the authentic story a story only they can tell a cumulative effect of all of this is a captivating alure these sides draw viewers in and they leave memorable Impressions I call this effect the digital magnetism but don't misunderstand me digital magnetism is not a marketing tactic and I have no idea why Oxfam is selling this book it's not magic it is not a recipe I believe digital magnetism is what you what you achieve when you

have authenticity Charisma energy Beauty notice all of these properties are describing very human qualities in fact the best way to describe this effect is in human terms it's about emotions it's about relationships that are created between the audiences and organizations I strongly believe that if we begin with the premise that emotional connections have greater impact than purely intellectual we can create digital experiences that have these qualities and so i' would like to walk you through how we do this at base but first things first let's consider that maybe the term UI design is setting us

off on the wrong foot in kind of a wrong direction of thinking there are actually no users they're people and what you're what we're designing is really not an interface as designers on the web we craft Communications connections experiences not interfaces unless of course you are designing an interface then please do design interface very well there are three important phases in the world work that we do uh on uh at base phase one is a critical moment of listening actively to understand the why and award of the project the audiences the landscape the organizational needs

all of it to clarify the opportunity so as Elizabeth said the project I'll walk you through today is a studio Museum in Harlem web relaunch Studio museum is a very special institution in everything it does it's challenging the notion of what it means to be a museum it's actually ref CED in its name Studio Museum in Harlem it's an active art making Studio it is a collecting Museum it's deeply rooted in Harlem not as just its location but as a source of its being its inspiration and so our thinking our thinking started with a new

building that is being built uh it's going to actually be its first purpose built building and it will open in 2025 its architecture is focused on quintessential Harlem experiences the street the stoop the stage and the sanctuary what if our website could also push boundaries and redefine what a museum is what if we could use a medium to evoke the animation of the street the invitation of the stoop the provocation of the stage and the Jubilation of the sanctuary these questions led us to the metaphor we needed to amplify a shift from a museum to

a meeting place the work in immersion phase is all about getting through the complexity through a lot of findings data observations interviews notes ultimately though it's all about getting to the insights that will serve us as the foundation for the work to come unlike other museums that are all about quiet contemplation Studio museum is about active art making Dynamic spirit so essential to Harlem unlike other Museum websites that focus on the artworks Studio Museum could focus on the artists starting with these insights we set out to define the future experience in this phase we synthesize

we crystallize the story we want to tell we focus on the pro on the purpose and the meaning shifting from the artworks to the artists we make artists our center of gravity we contextualize art through the lens of artists we make artists the entryway to our collection and exhibition and finally we double down on a Content that reflects the active art making still we were missing the spirit of Harlem after lots of searching and ideation the solution was actually obvious it was always there as it always as it often is inspired by Harlem's iconic Brownstone

stoop a dynamic meeting place echoing with cacophony of sounds voices and streets the concept of noise was born noise was to become the defining feature of our interactive experience but what will all that mean in reality of website this phase is the embodiment of the strategy yet again it starts with Explorations so here you see very early pencil sketches conceptual ideas that were born in the definition phase are now getting stretched and tested with experience ideas from freehand sketches to wires to flow diagrams what if the website was completely overtaken with sound as one would

experience sometimes on the streets of Harlem what if the experience was fully Dynamic driven by the conversations interviews art mix with context what if we could show artworks in context sometimes with Nar within narratives and other times with glimpses of other artworks removing imaginary barriers between artwork artist viewers we were actively trying to make artwork less precious more accessible to express the Serendipity of the museum experience the constant entangling of content and context sometimes curated sometimes random will ended on an idea of content at the periphery of vision every page would become contextualized with adjacent

content sometimes loud sometimes quiet there will always be noise in the periphery similar to how there is there's always noise in the background of Harlem once that idea once we had the idea of how the site will be experienced we were ready to bring it to life not an easy problem to solve and sometimes when we have big problems we break them down to smaller design challenges and we use words to actually start the design thinking somebody I think that person is here said words are my favorite visuals uh and so that's what we do

so we started by with descript of the world that we were creating for Studio Museum what describes a studio and what about Museum and finally how would we speak about Harlem so we now had set of set of keywords how do they all come together we could now start exploring visually and formally and we did a lot should it feel more active and experimental as an active place a studio would should it more should feel more institutional renowned as a museum with a global reputation should and how would we visually communicate the concept of a

meeting place is it active explicit part of the experience or graphic and layered on top of the experience this was our first attempt at the Lucen field and the noise concept visual Explorations and a little more noise concept visual Explorations some interesting stuff is starting to show up but overall the design was just not Landing it was too complicated it was lacking Clarity it was lacking impact you really did not know what was going on here and so we pivoted and we shifted the visual the focus to the typography starting with the identity System created

by Studio Pacific relying on the metaphor of the stoop and the meeting place we landed on a final Visual and interactive Direction with Museum's identity as a key graphic element and the center of the design system for the website making it flexible making it functional giving a systemic way to highlight the institution and the artists once we had that strong visual core coming back to the noise was much easier we were creating conversations and connections and at the end an unexpected elegant and intuitive experience experience where artists were not only at the center of the

content but were also literally able to speak in their own voice experience that is beautiful on desktop and mobile devices so this idea of noise seemingly simple and obvious created the guard guard rails that allowed us to explore and arrive to the final experienc solution We Believe Concepts should be bold they should spark imagination they should be simple so they can force everyone involved to make decisions ultimately they become the key to the authentic differentiation that creates digital magnetism I feel as though Harlem is at the studio Museum in [Music] Harlem extremely positioned [Music] at

the end the online experience of Studio Museum became authentic it tells the story only this Museum can tell it conveys the Charisma of an institution that is so fully devoted to fostering black art in America it has the energy the dynamism and the beauty of its home neighborhood in short the site builds the world that is magnetic so what happens when you achieve this people and organizations gain a tool to express and communicate who they are with confidence and authenticity experiences become beautiful impactful human to explore what it means for you try to follow these

three principles your client is always unique don't hesitate to dig deeper to find out once you find out build your foundation around that one key concept one key differentiator and then push every idea of design to its full expression I want to conclude with this quote from Steve Jobs he said this in 1983 when speaking in Aus in Aspen at the design at the actually business conference he was presenting personal computers now we have to remember that in 1983 personal computers were 2 years old there was no Mac this was the computer that apple had

that was Lisa everyone was thinking about how to make computers usable friendly more powerful smaller in their form and I'm sure jobs was too yet he was focused on the design obsessed with how to make objects beautiful the rest is history I believe we can do the same we can create more beautiful digital environments and bring forward a more compelling future thank you