Brody Associates returns from website hiatus with cleaner and more serendipitous online presence

Neville Brody’s studio, Brody Associates, made the decision a while back to take down its website and only showcase new projects on Instagram. The team had been too busy to keep the site updated, and the social media-led option appeared to be the solution; but soon they realised “it was always difficult to capture the full breadth of a project,” they tell It’s Nice That. Therefore work began on a new and improved website, with lessons learned from its social-first foray. “In an increasingly visual world we were looking at ways we could still be very succinct in what we say,” they explain, “yet still give users a little more context or depth to our work than Instagram allowed.”

Today the results of that insight have launched in the form of the new Brody Associates website, designed with and built by Madrid based graphic designer and developer Rafa Cobiella. And it is a showcase of the breadth of work the studio undergoes – from the iconic Channel 4 typeface to less high profile brand identities for Asian clients, such as the billion dollar Korean bakery chain Paris Baguette. The new site is populated with a huge amount of projects that haven’t been seen – as they were completed during BA’s internet break – and will continue to evolve as new and archival work is added, becoming a more permanent showcase for its mixture of work. Designed to give an instant snapshot of the studio’s work at any point, across disciplines and client types, the site is also intended to have "broader appeal" says the team, and reflect the studio’s mentality and attitude.

Compared with its previous site, which the team describe as “an unwieldy beast,” the new BrodyAssociates.com is clean and reductive. The home page celebrates two projects at a time via the full-bleed background image and its overlaid typeface – both of which change on every new visit to the page. The typeface is shown in a paragraph of text about the studio, set in one of Brody’s typefaces on rotation: TCCC Unity for The Coca-Cola Company, C4 Horseferry for Channel 4, Calvert Brody for the RCA (by Brody, Margaret Calvert and Henrik Kubel), or SamsungOne 700 created for Samsung.

Projects are displayed in thumbnail windows, each featuring a slideshow of images and more information at the click of a small plus icon, and the page scrolls horizontally to reveal more windows showing projects such as its type work for Mayo Clinic, workshops with the Design Museum and Nike, and print work for Tate Modern and Vandals magazine. The designers' reference to social media is subtly present, and its aim to pare back UX is fully realised. The hope is to increase engagement with "interesting interactions and movements," they explain, and easier use cross platform, with a mobile experience just as smooth as desktop. More importantly, the homepage shuffle of type and imagery is intended to channel the studio's creative ethos.

"Experimentation has always been a core part of our approach to design, framing it within systems," the team state. "This [device] allowed us to build in a sense of unpredictability, and lend a nice essence of serendipity and surprise to the digital realm."