Since our early days, we’ve kept a public archive of most projects we’ve designed, a collection of used, unused, and refused work. It contains nearly every pixel we’ve pushed since 2003 and is not curated. Today we’ve updated it with works from 2015–2017.
The archive uses Subfolio, a file browser app we created in 2008. We use it to present work and share files with our clients. While we no longer publicly support Subfolio, you can access it via Github and use it as you please.
Maintaining a public archive
While we use area17.com to promote our agency with curated work, the archive offers our entire body of work in one place, without filters. It is a liberating (and humbling) assertion of our holistic design output — the good, the bad, and yes, even the ugly. We also find it funny to see the progression of UI design practices over the years, through our agency lens.
By making the archive public, we hope that others can benefit from our work, using it as a benchmark or inspiration. Of course, we do not proclaim that our design decisions are the right ones and we welcome all forms of feedback. Teardowns are useful, such as Typography Teardown of Advertising Age by Jeremiah Shoaf. Critique and commentary are fun too, such as The King of Slash by Eli Schiff.
Openness and transparency
The archive is part of our agency mission to be open and transparent. Last year we released our first public guide for our design techniques and hope to release more soon. We often partner with our clients to write editorial around our collaborations. Soon, we will release our open source developer toolkits and boilerplates.
Together with the digital community at large, we are shaping the future of the Internet. Which in turn is shaping the world we live in. We want the Internet to be an extension of our daily lives, not a distraction from it. Through openness and transparency, together we will achieve this goal.
Originally published at Optical Cortex.
