A venture from the founders of The Letter D, (Mr.) Dan and (Mrs.) Nicole Pike, Capital P is a brave endeavour into shaking Brisbane’s tree of local creators to produce and publish home-grown printable ephemera in the genres of design, art and architecture.
The pieces lean both on the creative talents of The Letter D internally and a variety of creative pockets found wound around the river city.
The task was set to design and develop a launch site, surrounding the visual identity lead by Dan. After a few initial iterations, we soon arrived at the idea of using Capital P's Twitter feed to drive the website content.
Taking the concept of an alive and social site to the n-th degree, we began to toy with the notion of a website completely driven by a transient feed of Tweets, amalgam in an ad-hoc hierarchical structure.
Products (with prices, descriptions and other bits), images, news items, terms, contributor references, and press clippings are entered in to Twitter like a digital typewriter. A stream of content.
In execution, I developed a Backbone.js client-side site system that fetches content from the Twitter API and, using a set of hashtag hints, blends the 140-character content elements together into a more rigid structure of pages and panels.
I played with the visual metaphor of the panels collecting and arranging seemingly from empty space. The content boxes on each page shuffle and rearrange in front of the visitors eyes in seemingly fortuitous harmony backed by an underlying modular grid.
Clicking on an individual segment of text within the coloured blocks reveals a modal popup that exposes the underlying Tweet, and similarly serves as a lightbox for image content.
To complete the experience, this is tied together with a dynamic shopping cart system that integrates with Capital P’s ordering process.
