Leviathan Partners With The Uprising Creative For New Content-Driven Website

Over the past several weeks, Chad Hutson, Jason White, Matt Daly and their colleagues at conceptual design company Leviathan launched their new content-driven website created in partnership with the digital division of creative agency The Uprising Creative. The new site now online is currently nominated for "Site of the Day" honors in the prestigious Favourite Website Awards (FWA).

"Our primary goals were to display our work to maximum scale and provide visitors with a better experience," said Leviathan's executive producer Chad Hutson. "As we've grown over the past four years, our canon of work has grown exponentially, so we had to rethink how best to showcase ourselves. Everyone here is always very keen on showing our working processes and taking others behind the scenes, so another key facet was creating and integrating a 'Labs' blog to display research and development works-in-progress."

With executive creative director Jason White in the lead, Leviathan also enlisted staff designers DavidBrodeur and Gareth Fewel and producer Kelsey Barrentine to interface with The Uprising Creative'sinteractive director and partner Austin Mayer.

"We started with a massive wish-list of features and some original concept frames to create a brand new look," White began. "We craved complete control over image layout and type design, with the ambition that every page would look more like a modern design poster than a website. To tackle this challenge, Austin at The Uprising Creative came up with quite a few solutions to help bring our design frames to life and function with incredible efficiency."

"Given Leviathan's motion graphics specialty, a large focus was placed on transitions through site sections," Mayer explained. "Almost everything has an understated animation to drive home the fact that motion is the lifeblood of the studio. Lots of bleeding edge web tech was used to make this happen, including CSS3 animations, hardware accelerated animation, HTML5 push state, and much more."

Through their collaborations, the site took form as Mayer built a handcrafted front-end into a customWordpress theme, using libraries like Bourbon, Bourbon Neat, Animate.css, PJAX.js and Vimeo API. Along with streamlining the content management system to make it as simple as possible while also maximizing functionality, another major challenge was refining the animation throughout to allow movement to introduce and support the content in subtly and organically. Project teams across both companies cooperated in an exhaustive testing process, ensuring the design content translated well to code to offer intuitive user experiences and combating errors and bugs along the way.

"Based on early feedback, the color-coordinated project work pages appear to be a big hit," White said. "Also, the new Labs section is getting a lot of attention. Our audience has always enjoyed our project documentaries, and with this new platform, we are even more inspired to share more project processes, concept development and various tests we're into at the moment."