Our new website is live — finally. (And it won some things).
Despite the fact that we‘re over 2 years old, we’re only just launching a full MakeReign site. Doing your own site is always difficult. Finding the time to put in as much love and effort as we do with client work (which always takes priority) isn’t easy. You’re always super critical of your own stuff and it’s never really quite good enough to show the world — but we were finally ready to share it all with you. (And it won some things :D)
This is the showpiece for our creative design studio. With the objective of growing our brand internationally, increasing potential new partnerships and attracting top talent to want to work with us. Thus, speaking to multiple audiences; companies that have design needs, creative talent for hiring and the broader creative community — the people that will really champion you when their boss is looking to hire a design studio. (If you’re reading this and your boss is looking for a design studio — do ask her to get in touch!)
We collaborated on the site, which launched on 26 September 2018, with multi-award winning independent developer, Aristide Benoist, who built the site from scratch with Native WebGL, and local motion studio, okalpha who created the awesome renders we used for our case study headers.
The case studies are the core feature of the site as we wanted our pieces of work to really stand out and speak for themselves, obviously in order to drive new prospective partnerships. We tried to implement a new way of navigating to the cases where a visitor can hold down and access our cases anywhere on the site. We used WebGL to heighten engagement and interactivity with the cases.
We went for a minimalist style juxtaposed with the abstract 3D renders in our case studies. All the headers required a subtle conceptual tie-in to the services of the specific client, whilst maintaining that single visual thread, to help the work pieces stand out more. From a colour perspective we kept the site quite monochromatic, again, to allow the pieces of work to stand out. You can see a full ‘making of’ for those headers here.
AND WE WON A FEW THINGS!
The site has since been recognised on an international level with the awarding of an Awwwards Site of the Day (SOTD 2 October), becoming the first South African agency to do so since 2013. The award was followed by an FWA (Favourite Websites Award 3 October) and CSS Design Award (15 October) to complete the trio of top international digital design awards.
The site picked up multiple honours from Awwwards, including The Best Developer award. It was also recognised with the Awwwards Mobile Excellence Award in collaboration with Google. The Mobile Excellence Award celebrates work that puts users first, whilst bridging great design with pure performance. It recognises hard work and aims to raise the standards of the mobile web, allowing people to have a superior experience anytime, anywhere.
We were also awarded by the CSS Design Awards Official Public Vote to win Best UI Design, Best UX Design and Best Innovation.
We just wanted to say thanks to everyone who voted for us and gave such great feedback. This has been the dream from the very beginning — to push South African design on an international level. We put a lot of work into it, and really wanted to win these. To have done it is just amazing. We are immensely proud to be the first South African studio to have done it in ages.
We want to thank all our amazing partners, Aristide Benoist and the team at okalpha, who helped us bring the vision to life. But most importantly, thanks to our team at MakeReign for all the work put into this. We’ve put together, what we feel, is a really strong design team and this is validation that we are one of the strongest in South Africa.
We are excited to finally have shared our new site. We welcome any feedback and ways we could potential improve the site as we iterate it.
Also, we’ll stop milking this soon! Promise! ;)
