BASIC®

Crafted™

Best Homepage / Nominee

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BASIC®

Best Homepage

Nominee

In a time when people are more connected but also more siloed, we are passionate about crafting experiences that create space for conversation. - BASIC® Team

Q: Can you briefly describe your project and the concept behind it?

A: As an agency, we’re big believers in cultural exchange and pride ourselves on building experiences that provoke dialogue and bring people together. We asked ourselves what might happen if dissimilar groups sat side-by-side and were given a space to have transparent and real conversations despite their differences. It was out of this tension that Crafted™ was born, resulting in our dinner experiences, Artist Showcases, and Cultural Conversations—all connected digitally by ExperienceCrafted.com. The site is an homage to the real people who make up our vibrant community and a passion project that many at our agency have rallied behind.

Q: Talk about your initial prototypes. How did those ideas change throughout design and execution?

A: We had already started developing the brand as well as the visual look and feel before we came up with concepts for the website, so for this experience, we had a very clear point of view on what the site should look like and do.

Q: What influenced your chosen technical approach, and how did it go beyond past methods?

A: Our other digital projects were for client partnerships and internal promotion. ExperienceCrafted.com marks our first social initiative for the larger community, and as such, we wanted to lean into something that was more relatable and human. Using primarily tactile art direction, our goal was to bring the Crafted™ branding to life online. In this case, this meant blending hand-drawn and dynamic animations to merge the physical and digital worlds. For the page transitions, our designer Camilo Vargas illustrated a series of characters and animated them frame-by-frame. Additionally, smooth scrolling makes the experience flow as freely as the conversations at the table.

Q: What web technologies, tools, or resources did you use to develop this?

A: The content for the site is managed in a headless instance of Craft CMS. We developed Crafted™ using a modular layout system, which was also reflected in visual design. This allows each page to feel unique and reduces the time it takes to create new content. We use the GraphQL API to serve all of our data, which gives us complete control over queries and makes data easier to organize. It is also a vast performance improvement over older REST-based API systems. Client-side, Crafted is programmed with Javascript ES8 (via Babel) and SCSS on a custom Webpack stack.

What breakthrough or “a-ha” moment did you experience when concepting or executing this project?

Our epiphany didn’t come until after the site launched. We realized how much of a cultural impact we could have as an agency, even in the smallest ways. By engaging our community with this digital platform, we were able to unite people from different disciplines and backgrounds.

Q: How did the final product defy your expectations?

A: The response was completely unprecedented. To promote the site, we posted a single social media asset on our Instagram accounts and sent it out to past guests, garnering an aggregated total of 1,000+ likes. Since the initial launch, we’ve received more than 75,000 visitors to the site.

Q: Why is this an exciting time to create new digital experiences? How does your team fit into this?

A: More people than ever use digital experiences to connect, get their news, share ideas, shop, and even find love. These experiences shape our lives, both online and off. Today, experiences feed us content and information that we are more likely to “like,” which means we often miss out on content or information that could possibly challenge our perspectives. So, in a time when people are more connected but also more siloed, we are passionate about crafting experiences that create space for conversation.