You never know when or where inspiration is going to appear.
After founding the company in 2010, it took me a year and a half to take a real vacation and unplug. I still remember landing in Rio de Janeiro and desperately wanting to check my email. After about three days I started to not think about work and enjoy my time in the Southern hemisphere.
While at the modern museum in the city, I came across the Taschen book Portraits. On the cover was a very cool illustration of Mark Zuckerberg by Raphaël “MyDeadPony” Vicenzi. This coincided with my phase of impulsively buying Facebook-related items, so I bought the heavy book and brought it back to New York City with me.
I really loved the style of the cover so much that I reached out to the artist to buy a print (yes, I have Facebook-related artwork!). I also inquired about commissioning Raphaël to work on a design for the Sociality Squared website, and he pointed me to the design agency that represents him, Colagene. With their help and my dear friend Johan Ronsse’s, Sociality Squared revealed a new website that went live in March of 2012.
At the time, it was at the cutting edge of one-page websites that are now ubiquitous across the web. The illustrations really made the site and would come to define our branding. The concept of the design was simple: every story starts with an idea.
Fast-forward to Social Media Week 2018 and Sociality Squared’s panel on building meaningful communities. We hosted the event at the Assemblage and I was really impressed with their website. As a serial saver of links, I noted it as a cool design and out of curiosity, I also reached out to the agency who built it to understand the ballpark range of what a site like that would cost. A month or two later, I signed a contract to work with No Format to bring the next chapter of Sociality Squared’s website to life.
The concept of this site built on the first and what’s at the core of Sociality Squared: we bring stories to life. We wanted it to be welcoming, come alive, and showcase our creativity and the amazing social media work that we do for our family of clients. No Format’s work with parallaxes and moving graphics really does this well. We also wanted it to be in the same spirit as our original illustrations. As we went through a lot of different design iterations, Aleksandar, the art director, said, “What about newspaper print for the graphics?” I loved it! It’s a nod to old mediums and to new.
As with all of our projects here at Sociality Squared, it was collaborative. And a special thanks goes out to the Sociality Squared team, especially Kristy who helped write and re-write the copy for the site and Kate who offered her creative eye on the design direction. And a big thanks to the team at No Format for helping bring our vision alive.
With that, today, we’re really excited to share our new home for Sociality Squared: https://socialitysquared.com/
We hope you love it as much as we do!
-Helen
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