S5 Studios Upega Tafa'ilagi

Press Kit

Unique Properties

"Shapely, Sharp, Skillful, Splendid, Supreme."
S5 Studios is a creative studio that incorporates these five adjectives into the artist's work. It also serves as a portfolio for the commissioned works of Shogo Tabuchi.
This website places particular emphasis on presenting the artist's ideas and strengths through the design, execution, and music of the website to create a vibrant user experience that draws on unique designs and cutting-edge technology.

Dimensions & Packaging

Available in the latest versions of Chome, Firefox, Safari, iOS and Android

Tags

Art director, Web designer, Portfolio, Design Agencies, Promotional, 3D, GSAP Animation, PixiJS, Craft CMS, Three.js

Production Technology

Pixijs and three.js allow for asynchronous browsing in all directions, while gsap and css3 are used for finer transitions and animations. Objects are efficiently managed in javascript by using fewer than 100 classes, and the website’s responsive design keeps user experience consistent across all devices.
A cms was built to update Works and Information. Due to concerns with a slow server-side cms, I used ejs to build a system that generates html automatically when Json files are updated locally.

Design Challenge

Designing a website that captures an artist’s individuality is difficult. This design is not flat but spatial in nature, so we can only imagine how users will experience this space. It took over 6 months to complete this design as I had to repeatedly tweak the user flow and visual elements.
In addition to creating materials to share the design aims with developers, the designers also complemented the work of engineers by collaborating on programming after they built the development environment.

Research

Although sites such as Awwwards feature excellent websites around the world every day, there are many websites with similar designs around.
I believe that each website should be designed differently as each brand is unique. In particular, portfolio websites must capture the artist’s individuality.
covid-19 has limited how artists can share their works, making online promotion critical for them.
It is thus important to create portfolios unique to artists by harnessing their ideas and strengths.

Inspiration

Designers work on new tasks by drawing inspiration from the toolbox of knowledge and experience in their mind. The design concept for this website is no different.
This website’s landing page is a dark space with floating particles, which alludes to how ideas coalesce in an abstract space. Users are led to individual sections, and as they venture deeper into the website, the thumbnails of projects are shown. Information is presented in more granular detail the deeper it is in the site hierarchy.

Project Duration

October 2019 - Designing the first draft
February 2020 - How many prototypes will be designed
May 2020 - Development work begins.
　Designed 160 pages of case studies and news pages
　Music and photography production
September 2020 - Completed
October - Published on the web

Operation Flow

Start by selecting whether you want to browse the website with/without background music. Users can turn music on/off at any time when browsing.
Navigate the top page by clicking on a section that interests you. I have created a larger clickable area for “Works,” which brings users to a page where they can scroll through the different project categories. Clicking “Explore” brings them deeper into the site and displays a list of projects.
This site has a similar user interface on all devices.