Curtain up on our brand new content site
TLDR — We made a new site. You can see it here.
Creativity is magic. But creativity is also really f***ing messy — it comes with frustrations and false-starts and wrong-turns aplenty. I know this is true — I’ve spent nearly ten years writing about artists, designers, photographers and the work they make. I’ve always tried to dig into this darker side of the creative process, the part of the story which often gets smoothed away in the telling.
Despite all this, when it came to rethinking, redesigning and relaunching our content site, I was surprised by how difficult it was. When I joined WeTransfer two years ago, we started our This Works blog, a simple, functional way of telling the stories behind the WeTransfer.com wallpapers.
We were able to make interesting posts about talented creatives in a very straightforward way. But when we had a bigger collaboration (with Bjork, or Ryan McGinley or FKA twigs) our tech and design teams in our in-house studio would create bespoke microsites for each project.
These special pages felt like the future. The artists loved the care and consideration we took to tell each individual story. So did our readers — time on site leapt up on these pages and the reaction on social media was huge.
So in the past year we went right back to basics. There are many, excellent websites that cover creativity. What would make our site different? The main thing was time. While other sites publish multiple articles every day, we only want to tell about four stories every week. Could we use this time to shape every story we tell, to present every artist and every project in a way that felt special?
That was the challenge we set ourselves — to bring the level of craft and customization you get in print to an online platform. I think we made a good stab of it.
Almost every part of every page can be customized. We can change the background, the type and the furniture elements (like the progress bar) to any color in the world. The top visual can be a static image, an animated loop, click-to-play video, or click-to-play audio. When that top unit scrolls up, it’s meant to evoke a curtain raising before a performance.
We have built in multiple ways to present video, and even more ways to present imagery. Our gallery mode allows us to build very magazine-y (is that a word?) designs to play with the pace of our presentation. We’ll also customize every social call-to-action at the end of every piece, a small touch that speaks to our bigger ambition of moving away from anything one-size-fits-all.
We also talked a lot about the magic-trick analogy (another call-back to our curtain-raising). When you see a magic trick, sometimes you don’t want to know how it was done. Ignorance can be enthralling as you’re content to be bedazzled. The same goes for creative work. Sometimes I just want to sit back and enjoy it on its own merit.
We designed the site to always make this possible. Videos are presented front and center, to be watched with no baggage at all. If you click an image in an article, you open the view mode which strips away all text and allows you to scroll through the pictures alone.
But, as with magic, sometimes you are desperate to know more, to peek behind the curtain and understand how they did that. The obvious way to add this context is with our written pieces. But there are more layers for anyone who wants to go further, to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Throughout our stories you’ll see colored dots — if you click on these they open up in-line notations. These might be explanatory texts, comments from the writer or the editor, images that help illustrate a point and even podcasts which take an idea and run with it. You will also come across audio clips, dropped in at various stages to add atmosphere, context or let you hear from the creatives directly.
As we developed the new site, we had some existential moments (I’d hesitate to call them crises). Why do we have this site? What does it exist to do? WeTransfer’s mission is to enable the effortless transfer of creative ideas. With 75% of our users identifying as creatives, the one billion files they share every month are photographs, films, flat-plans, music tracks, magazine designs etc.
As the company evolves, we want to empower creative minds to spark, develop, share and present their ideas.
This new site has been conceived as a place for people to devour creative ideas which will, in turn, help them develop their own creative projects. This is summed up by a line we discussed a lot — inspiration means nothing until you do something with it.
So that fed into a lot of our decisions too. Scroll down the homepage and new projects fade into the feed — new ideas hoping to snag your attention. We’ve done away with titles in the traditional sense, instead all the headlines are quotes from the artists themselves.
So rather than present Francisco Martins’ work in the expected, direct way — “Brazilian illustrator Francisco Martins has an impressive editorial portfolio” — we pull a quote from his interview and it opens up, “I’m kind of a weirdo kid. There’s no romanticism in me.” We hope that combination might fire off different associations in the readers’ minds.
But we also understand that for a lot of creatively-minded people, it’s more about the visuals than the words. No problem — hit the “Picture this” button in the corner of the homepage and it’s re-shown in an image-first tile board.
This idea of unexpected connections shaped our approach to related content too. While most sites assume that having just consumed a photo story you’ll be in the mood to see more photo stories, we’ve assumed the opposite. We want to embrace serendipity, and so the related content is actually all unrelated — archive stories pulled at random. We want people to choose their own adventure.
The final question we asked ourselves a lot was about the new site’s relationship to WeTransfer.com, the mother ship. We wanted it to have some recognisably WeTransfer elements, without being a slavish clone. So while the top image mirrors the WeTransfer wallpaper dimension, and the logo always appears in the top left-hand corner, we went for a different set of typefaces to better fit an editorial proposition.
When it comes to content sites, it’s hard to reinvent the wheel. There is only so far you can push things before you compromise the main objective which is to communicate with readers. I hope though that we have made several bold choices which explore what a WeTransfer content site could and should be.
A huge thanks to our team here — Thomas, Karen, Laszlito, Danielle, Gabor, Erik, Thijs, Suzanne, Lucy, other Thomas, Martijn, Manpreet, Damian, Annematt and everyone else for their insight and input. A huge thanks to Johnny and Stevijn from Cartelle who challenged our thinking and understood what we were shooting for.
I hope it’s a site that readers enjoy, that artists want to be featured on and that everyone at WeTransfer can be proud of. This is only the start, but it feels like we’ve taken a very exciting first step.
