There’s no such thing as a website redesign

Reimagining the Nickelodeon Animation Studios website

Published in

Struck

7 min readMay 8, 2015

Nickelodeon Animation Studios. Birthplace of Ren. Spongebob. Slime. “Boogers as jetfuel”. Home to some of the most irreverent, edgy and groundbreaking animation of the last 20 years. We’re talking about the studio, not the network. The artists, not the fans. Animation, not live action.

The Ask

NAS came to Struck with a very tactical problem: we have too many websites. 4, in fact, all aimed at recruiting for various departments and programs within the studio. Writing. Animation. Job-type-jobs. Internships. 4 seperate sites doing business 4 different ways. A real brand mess and difficult to manage operationally.

Some Background

We’ve worked with NAS for a few years now, mostly in the physical realm, and always in service of celebrating and invigorating the culture. It’s a very creator-first company; creators set the tone, provide the creative energy and are, in essence, the brand of the studio. Over the years we’ve executed some pretty cool things for them:

Nychos Spongebob mural:

Creator portrait wall:

Poster series:

… and other top-secret projects in the works.

Getting Close

Even though we knew the NAS brand and culture inside and out, we didn’t know much about how they acquire talent, which is the entire purpose of the website, after all. So we talked to everyone we could who had been through the process, the people in charge of the process, and aspiring talent to understand how they think about pursuing a career in animation, and what’s unique and special about NAS. We talked to recruiters, animation students, program members and interns, animation schools and the artists themselves to get as much perspective as possible. Opportunities for professional animators are vast, but NAS considers its principle competition for talent to be the trimverate of Disney, Pixar and Cartoon Network, so we spent some time examining those websites from both a tactical and cultural perspective.

Some Findings

Insight 1: No one thinks about programs within NAS, they want to work at Nickelodeon.

Insight 2: Competitor studios are really closed off culturally.

Insight 3: Nothing is more exciting to aspiring artists that to see their heroes at work (play).

Insight 4: NAS is a kid’s funhouse powered by boogers as jetfuel *

If that was the character of your company, would you really just list jobs?

We realized during our discovery process that there was a big disconnect between the goals of the website and the things that truly inspire and attract talent. This wasn’t just about combining 4 websites, this was about engaging the next generation of artists and letting them know that NAS was the place where they’d have the freedom to do the best work of their careers. We also saw a giant gap between what NAS was all about culturally and the way it was expressing itself digitally. So that’s when this project changed.

New Assignment:

Inspire future creators.
(combine websites? sure, why not.)

Back to that giant gap (and why redesigns don’t exist)

A website refresh is always driven by aspiration. Here’s where we are now, here are the motivations for change, here’s the place we want to be. We’ve haven’t seen a website yet that can just be reskinned and updated visually and reach that aspirational place; there is always a need to reimagine, recreate, reframe, and reinvigorate stories about a brand. The studio was no different. Porting over that same storytelling into a new frame wasn’t going to move them forward. So we knew this project was as much about content strategy as it was about design.

When it came to NAS, we relied on a few core guiding principles:

Creators as Currency. We needed to build narratives that would convey the creator-driven culture to really connect with this audience.
Warts, pimples, farts and all. We knew that in order to express NAS’s unique culture, we couldnt have any fear of showing experimentation and acknowledgement of failure in the creative process.
Create the unexpected. Building surprising interactions and fun easter eggs throughout the site would be a great way to mirror the brands playful energy.
Evergreen design. In order to stay modern, the site should have clean and sophisticated design to really make the work itself shine, and be a framework that could handle any kind of show or content the studio dreamed up.

Design and Content Solves

Gallery System
We designed a full-frame gallery with a light-dimming effect to really bring focus to the amazing artwork from shows, sketchpads and random experiments directly for the artists desks. Check one out here.

Inside the Studio
We used video to capture life at the studio in all of its barely controlled chaos. Have a look inside.

Character Timeline
We wanted a nod to Nick’s rich history, but rather than show a typical historical timeline of shows, we took a mural from the NAS lunchroom and made it into an immersive, playful digital experience.

Creator Interviews
Getting up close and personal with the creators of the shows was essential for the site to work, but what if some of them don’t like to be on camera? Solution: make a puppet.

Recruiting Video
We wanted to make sure that the studio’s culture expressed itself all the way down to how they talk about working there and the application process itself, so we made a recruiting video loaded with wackiness: show references, props, and tons of hand-made art by our creative team. Watch it here.

Takeaways

(or, a few lessons we re-learned but are totally going to remember this time)

There’s no such thing as a redesign. It’s important to always think of modern website projects as a reimagining, not simply redesigning. There are so many potential motivations for redoing a website; business goals, a culture gap, an audience disconnect or a new one to reach, operational needs…none of these reasons ever add up to “take our existing content and put it in a new design framework.” There is always a need to bridge the present with that aspirational future.

Content creation is hard, even for content creation companies. After we identified the gap we needed to fill in terms of storytelling about NAS, we figured there would be a giant vault somewhere with all the assets we needed, or that they could quickly turn the cameras on themselves and generate all the studio B-roll we could ever want. Both turned out not to be the case, and we spent a lot of time finding ways to pull or create show assets and document the studio. Turning a lens on what you do every day is challenging for any brand, and an animation studio is no exception.

Prototyping isn’t an option anymore. The demands of the site to surprise and delight, and the need for it to feel, well, animated, finally killed our paper processes once and for all. There was simply no way to communicate those needs using our traditional methods; collaboration between design and development to prototype all of the nuanced interactions we wanted for the site was the only way to make it work.