The site with no content and all the content
March 27th, 2008
A friend sent me today a link to the just-redesigned website of Boston, Massachusetts base advertising agency Modernista.
All of the content of their website is actually off-site: text in Wikipedia, videos in You Tube, stills in flickr; the site is just a tiny red JavaScript-based menu with an iframe behind it.
Creative director Gary Koepke says in an interview to Creativity:
“There’s such a challenge for ad agencies to be known as digitally savvy and understand what’s going on the medium. We wanted to prove to people that we understand a way that we can have a transparent, open source and highly successful site.”
Well, I think they nailed it.
This approach has at least two great qualities:
- It absolutely expresses how up-to-date the company is, not in terms of visual communication (which should be a commodity in their playing field), but in respect to deeply understanding the way information finds it’s way around nowadays and how open to comments and participation any enterprise must be to succeed in this community-driven world.
- This is a unique solution to their problem, which can’t quite be ‘borrowed’ or ‘be of inspiration’ to the competition. I mean: there’s nothing that can be similar to it: it’ll be either exactly the same or something entirely different. Anything in the middle would be seen as a blatant rip-off. Achieving this in an environment in which stuff is copied all over fast and easily is quite an accomplishment.
I look forward to see how this echoes around the web.