“So much fun. So much weird. I loved it.” —Maria D’Amato
“Hip vibes and irreverent, unexpected design give tantalizing clues to what lurks within this agency’s style.” —Boo Wong
Overview: Austin-based creative agency DIKO prides itself on creating work that stands out. So, when designing its own site, it wanted to eschew the typical cookie-cutter portfolio site that displays no imagination when it comes to UX design. Drawing inspiration from brutalist web design and its disregard for accepted practices, diko.co presents a joyful assault on the senses, packed with frenzied color, mismatched type, meme videos and plenty of microinteractions that satisfy those of us with short attention spans while visually portraying DIKO’s character in a way that sticks in our minds.
The website features more than sixteen homepage microinteractions with two menu items: WORK and FAQ U.
The landing page uses a vertical scroll, and the WORK page uses a horizontal scroll. The more visitors scroll, the more dynamic elements become, such as animated type and autoplaying videos.
Within the first three months after its launch, DIKO’s website received more than 20,000 visits, exceeding the design firm’s metrics by more than tenfold.
Comments by Diko Daghlian and Chad Rea:
How did your collaboration with Copenhagen-based digital design agency Spring/Summer change the site’s course? “We initially considered custom coding, but our longtime interactive partners at Spring/Summer, masters of taming the seemingly complicated, recommended using Webflow. Despite it being an unconventional choice for immersive interactivity, from our past work, we knew the team under founder Pelle Martin could melt diamonds and bend steel. They pushed the platform to do what we needed, injecting code and finding creative solutions. The outcome led to diko.co being featured in Webflow’s customer stories, social platforms and yearly developers conference.”
Did you meet with any extraordinary obstacles during development? “If we’re talking about creative production, yes. Most sites or campaigns can be visually one-dimensional by design to keep a cohesive visual tone. Our concept was to bring every possible surprise in to keep the audience engaged. It was quite a bear to wrangle the assembly of artists, editors, designers, animators and technicians—among others—that were each contributing to their small section of the site. Because of the workflow, we would sometimes have to pause development when a new idea came up, and we would have to scramble to produce the art.”
Is the audience you were targeting a particularly difficult one to reach? “Good creative typically finds good creative. However, marketing executives are increasingly harder to reach directly. Fortunately, in our experience, new business typically comes from the agency getting media attention or through word of mouth. We strive to make unexpected content for our clients that gets noticed, talked about and shared. And we’re our most important client, so we have that going for us.”
