GSD&M Presents

Building a content-first, editorially driven showcase of Austin’s creative class.

GSDM is known within Austin not just as an advertising agency, but also as a host of numerous events, shows and parties in town, both during and outside of the SXSW conference/festival. To reflect the role that the agency plays in the local creative community, GSD&M Presents showcases some of the amazing artists, musicians, designers, chefs and other creatives that call Austin home.

Developed alongside Maria D’Amato as designer, we put together a highly-content driven but graphically rich site featuring blog-post style written content; interviews with bands, industry figures and local creatives; musical performance videos from artists and bands based both in and out of Austin; photography hooked in from social platforms such as Instagram; and audio playlists embedded from Soundcloud and Spotify featuring highlights from the many music festivals for which Austin is renowned. Acting as less of an advertising industry-specific site and more of a reflection of the agency’s culture and community links, GSD&M Presents is a great complement to GSD&M’s online presence.

Screenshot of gsdmpresents.com on mobile devices

Built on a Wordpress platform, the site features a hand-built custom theme, coded from the ground-up using HTML5 and CSS3. Maria and I both played a role in the IA and UX of the site, with a highly graphical homepage grid featuring a “river” of content which is searchable and filterable via a fixed navigation menu.

The content isn’t subdivided into pages of posts/articles and instead uses an asynchronous “Load More” button to allow the user to continue browsing content without leaving the page.

Screenshot of gsdmpresents.com on large screen

Within the article pages themselves, a content-first layout places the writing and the imagery front and center, with only a series of related items and a forward/backward/category/home navigation (designed with browsing and discovery in mind) fixed at the top the only distractions from reading.

Developed using a mobile-first methodology, the site is easily consumed on a variety of devices, from smartphones up to desktop browsers with feature-parity maintained across the entire site.

Credits

Agency: GSD&M
Design Maria D’Amato
Development: Joel Parr
Producer: Michael Rose

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