• 1/6 
    the crew at seed asked us to take on the web site that accompanies the science magazine’s year end issue: the universe in '09. we came up with a microfiche viewer concept, that allows for a close up look at the pressing issues science, politics, and design will face in the year of the ox.
  • 2/6 
    The mantra for the universe in 2009.
  • 3/6 
    The whole issue spread out: We selected climate from the top and the associated nodes highlighted.
  • 4/6 
    Drag, zoom, and select topics from the secondary navigation that highlights concepts.
  • 5/6 
    The image viewer allows for zooming into the details of the photos and illustrations. we utilized an open source project, and subsequently made all code for the UI09 freely available as well.
  • 6/6 
    Sisters: The year end magazine issue and the site living side by side. We didn't have to invent a whole lot, just pay close attention to what was already there.

view ui09 site (new window)

Seed - The Universe in '09

we found out that a busy client can be a good thing: Seed trusted us with little interference to carry the responsibility for launching our ambitious project in just a matter of weeks to coincide with the world economic forum “davos”.  In our brainstorm session we made sure that content was king. We went out of our way to create ways to show off the spectacular graphics and photos in the issue at full resolution and give the user the chance to explore the breadth of content first hand.  In keeping true with the print issue design, we integrated a way-finding mechanism in form of a spectral navigation: Just roll over the bar to highlight the associated content nodes or hover over a node to see its’ tags appear.

outcome

The Universe in ‘09 is a exploration of the content of the print issue at the highest resolution possible. the flash front-end is driven by a content management system that makes content creation and presentation as easy as dragging and dropping. ui09 was the 2nd most visited content on seedmagazine.com in the month it launched, it got picked up by many design and information design blogs, and lit up the crowd on twitter.

back to the work matrix ←

team

concept
fangohr, llc

programming
rumi humphrey
alec cumming

art direction + design
florian fangohr

strategy
xavier thomas

design and production
elsa chaves

thanks for the acknowledgements:
block letters
mento.info
straighline jp
design observer
swiss miss