Type/Code is a digital agency based out of Brooklyn, NY. The founding partners met at Parsons School of Design while exploring the intersection of design and technology, and we really enjoyed designing and building stuff together, so we decided start a studio. Our team is pretty evenly split between folks with a design focus, and folks with a development focus, but we all live somewhere along the designer/developer spectrum. We love projects that let us take a deep dive into content and product strategy, and then design, develop, launch, and iterate on awesome digital experiences.

We are primarily a digital studio, so a lot of our design process is tailored to the web as a core medium. One way that we look at web design differently than print is that on the web we are usually creating a “living” system rather than a static artifact, which introduces a whole bunch of unique opportunities and challenges.

Our name, Type/Code, grew out of our fascination of where design and development meet, with both typography and code serving as core building blocks for our discipline. That presented an opportunity to play with the interesting juxtaposition between the organic curves of our logotype (drawn by the wonderful Lucas Sharp), and a kinetic and malleable explosion of pixels. The final experience embodies the quick one-liner of what we do: we design things and make them come to life. To execute this, we started with a square-packing algorithm that fits progressively smaller squares into the form of our logo– basically ‘pixels’ that we could then animate. We created an initial prototype in Processing, and then recreated the current 3D version in Canvas/WebGL so that it would run in web browsers. Concept aside, it was also a really fun opportunity to see what was possible with some brand new technologies in 2012.

The order is randomly generated every time the page loads because we have a very flat internal structure– everyone on our team is bringing something unique to the table, which means we all have to be leaders at various phases of our projects.

Design fundamentals around communication strategy, typography, form, layout, color, pacing, etc. will transcend any specific area of design – including the web, so that will always be important. Since web design specifically is incredibly young as a discipline, and evolving at the same speed that technology is, there is a unique opportunity to always be questioning and iterating on common patterns.

This being such a personal project made the process rewarding, but challenging (we are our own harshest critics). It was a great opportunity for us to reflect on who are, what we do, and how we want to present ourselves.

Initial designs were mocked up in Photoshop and Illustrator, but we like to move into code as quickly as we can to continue solving things as a fully responsive layout. On the development end of things, a text editor is primary tool (most of us use Sublime).

The more we do it, the more intuitive it becomes – but there are always surprises when something makes the jump from a couple of static mock-ups into a living, responsive experience on different devices. This is why we like to move into code as early in the process as we can, so that we can continue to massage things on a malleable canvas, and avoid design decisions that ‘break’ in certain contexts.

Being your own client can be tough – it’s easy to justify one more round of design exploration, or push that launch deadline out one more week. On the development end of things, performance for the splash experience posed some interesting performance challenges – we ended up dynamically adjusting the number pixels that get rendered depending on the user’s processor power, and degrading to a 2D version on older browsers (if you press the ‘D’ key while on the landing page, you can toggle between the 3D and 2D version).

We are always keeping our ear to the ground and absorbing everything we come across. The digital design community is very good at sharing stuff, so we love to peek under the hood of what folks are experimenting with – which is one of the great things about open web technologies.

Most of our projects were designed to work well across a range of devices, so we wanted to showcase that in how we presented our case studies. Our general rule of thumb these days that “responsive” is not really a feature any more – but rather just the appropriate way to design and build most digital experiences.

It is an exciting time to be a designer or developer, with the disciplines merging and evolving so quickly. Watching and experiencing so many “ah-ha!” moments (and utter failures) in digital design over the past decade is both humbling and empowering. As software continues to “eat the world,” it is amazing to be able to leverage such powerful communication and product design tools, among a community that is collectively learning and improving.