R/GA's main corporate website has a radical design in information architecture terms, which it hides in plain sight.
Dave Malouf coined a prescient phrase in the title of a recent blog post regarding the design of websites. It’s not really a page anymore, but more of a stage. “Like the real stage itself,” he wrote, “we can create sub-stages where sub-dominant contexts have great significance and focus if only but for a short while, while contextually relevant to the whole.” This is a tidy way of characterizing the very essence of the RIA movement, and an excellent conceptual framework for understanding the information architecture of the post-page web. Web designers have traditionally constructed virtual buildings, not narratives, out of information – with pages as their rooms and sitemaps and breadcrumbs as their planning tools and system of wayfinders. But this is changing fast and stagecraft is soon to become a key skill of all employed web IAs.
Perhaps the most subtle and clear evidence of this shift towards the modal and the temporal over the structural is in the interactive agency, R/GA’s, corporate website. This site looks absolutely basic. Mostly white space and type, it fetishizes a simpler time and a simpler web. In fact, it is the anti-R/GA site, avoiding just the types of bells and whistles the agency dishes out for it’s high-end clients like Nike, Nokia, and HBO. There is no fancy photography, no use of animations, not a single gradient fill or rounded corner, not one lightbox overlay, and – perhaps a first for an R/GA design – no homepage carousel. In fact, its fanciest interaction is that most old-school of all in-page transitions – the anchor-link.
The site is comprised of one large home page that scrolls under a fixed upper pane where the navigation lives. All interior pages are launched modally from this page.
Yet, on my first visit, I overlooked the subtle charms of the site. In fact, it took me a minute of poking around to realize the site has no persistent global navigation that extends to it’s interior pages (unless you ask for it by hovering over the logo in the upper left), no breadcrumbs to keep a user oriented, and not even category pages! It is simply one long home page, divided into sections that are scrollable via a set of links in a fixed upper pane over a scrollable body. From this home page, one launches the site’s content one sub-dominant context at a time.
This design is simple enough that it feels radical in this day and age. In fact, I can’t imagine one of their fancy brand clients agreeing to it, which must be why they dogfooded the design for their own company website. Yet it is surprisingly satisfying to use, with it’s subtle animated transitions adding true delight – perhaps because they are used so sparingly. I have one minor critique – which is that the X’s used to close out of modal pages are more of a designer’s artifice than something a user would understand. The X is too large to suggest a familiar window control, it occurs too far to the right, and though it looks cool, it takes too long to realize that the page is indeed modal. Overall, this is a great design, hiding in plain site.
All content is launched modally. Notice the lack of persistent global navigation, encouraging the user to close out and return to previous context.
Even list pages are launched modally. Which allows for the unusual modal-on-modal if a user opens a news item from here.
Such an "anti-design" for a fancy agency serves a purpose - it makes the client work look that much more striking in the case study area of the site.
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