After the longest and surely softest “launch” in history, we’re excited to present the redesigned thirteen23.com. This completes the brand refresh we embarked upon last fall, and while we’ll continue to refine the details, we think this is a big step forward.
We now have a way to provide much more compelling responses to the three most important questions an agency site should answer: Who are you? What have you done? How did you do it?
What’s New?
Timeline
We’ve always had an About page to help answer the “Who are you?” question, but headshots and employee factoids only paint part of the picture. To flesh out the details, we’ve started archiving all the little tidbits we publish each day on Twitter and Tumblr, and have merged them into one infinitely-scrolling timeline to rule them all on our new home page.
And because our work is an important part of who we are, you’ll find our projects inserted into the timeline as well. It’s been pretty cool to see everything collected in one place, and we’re looking forward to doing fun things with the archives.
Portfolio
The single biggest reason for the redesign was to give us a better way to show off our client work, so we’ve given our project pages a promotion. In the old design, they were items in a list on a single page, but now each has their own page, packed with large-format images, with enough room for us to write as much or as little as needed about the work.
We’ve also added a project directory to better showcase our favorites.
Garage
At thirteen23, we’ve always had the concept of a “lab”: an experiment that isn’t quite a full-blown project, but isn’t a throwaway demo either. It’s been difficult to explain, so today we’re opening a new section of our site called the Garage.
Equal parts mini-project showcase and exploratory blog, the Garage is where we’ll tinker with new ideas and show off some of the thinking behind the work we’ve done.
Under the Hood
Responsive? ✔ Check.
Adaptive images? ✔ Check.
Retina icons? ✔ Check.
Anti-CMS CMS? ✔ Check.
We’ve learned a lot about the “new normal” of designing for small screens that can display giant images, and hope to write up some of our findings soon, along with a more detailed discussion of our Rube Goldberg-esque backend & deployment system. It’s been a lot of fun to hack on.
Goodbye, Wheel
As always, it’s out with the old, and in with the new, so today we bid adieu to our giant spinning-wheel navigation UI and the site we built around it.
We believe it’s best to move forward while keeping one eye on the past, so we’ve moved the old site to its new home in the thirteen23 archives. It served as a fantastic showpiece, but we couldn’t be happier with our new direction.