Architecture Commons
UI Design, Full-site Development
2019 March - July
Architecture Commons is a design agency for urban innovation. It emphasises on working collaboratively with stakeholders to ensure social cohesions with citizens, businesses, institutions, and governments.
Architecture Commons needed an online presence to go along with their deep and expansive portfolio with in-depth case studies and industry-leading projects. The website needs to gain trust from visitors as an established design agency that has handled significant projects.
The website will be bi-lingual in English and Traditional Chinese.
A neutral tone that puts emphasis on the projects, case studies, and team members.
Since Architecture Commons is a design firm in itself, they had a few references and directions they wanted to go. There wasn't a demand for UX research as they have in mind how the website should look and feel. Thus, a lot of the research was on how the website is built and executed.
CSS-grid
The layouts were made possible with CSS-grid, that allows a more dynamic way to position blocks and how much space it takes up.
Infinite Scroll Loop
The team wanted an effect in the homepage that when the user scrolled to the bottom of the page, the top of the page will loop back to the top. There were many different solutions, only one that has worked, but unfortunately did not work with iOS devices due to some limitations to protect users from malicious websites.
CMS
This was the first time I have the opportunity to build a CMS to go along with the frontend. It was a great learning process to gain knowledge on the structures on the backend, as well as to think about the process of a person who needs to maintain the website. The website was build with Webflow, it wasn't a self built CMS, but there were still plenty of lessons learnt.
Webflow
The full website was built with Webflow, and has now become my go-to website building tool.
Overall Result
The team and I were quite satisfied with how the website looked after all. It was unfortunate that I was not able to find a solution that works across browsers that could get the website to loop. However, everything else had worked as Architecture Commons continue to work on incredible projects and continues to grow as one of the leading urban design firms internationally.
This was one of my personal favourite projects as the whole process were extremely enjoyable with a good balance of being frustrated with technicalities that I were able to mostly overcome. The team believed in me, and gave me time and space to build, while I have followed in their design language, as well as provided my own thoughts and decisions to create a greater result.
As I was updating my own portfolio, I am pleasantly surprised that the website still holds up pretty well after a few years. However, I did notice some things I can improve on. I shall message them to see how they are doing.