VISUAL DIALOGUE
Ground is a landscape architecture firm specializing in large-scale green roofs, urban landscapes, public art and land planning. The principal of Ground is Shauna Gillies-Smith, who teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and, prior to founding Ground, had been design director at one of the world’s most-recognized landscape architecture firms, Martha Schwartz, Inc. Visual Dialogue has been working with Gillies-Smith since she founded Ground, developing the landscape firm’s identity system as well as its website.

“The goal of the website was to present the diverse range of Ground’s work in a clear, visually engaging and easy-to-update design to a target audience of both architects and developers,” says Visual Dialogue creative director Fritz Klaetke. “The client wanted the site to be ‘accessible, not elite’ and to avoid ‘Archispeak.’” Gillies-Smith prefers to bypass grad-school lingo and make her sophisticated concepts available to everyone. “The overall message,” Klaetke continues, “is to convey the unique combination of ‘radical and practical’ in Ground’s work—i.e., creating leading-edge design which is both ‘do-able’ and sustainable. We focused on a fairly straightforward, flexible case-study approach using images and descriptions of their work to represent this.” The Flash-based site works off an XML backbone and was designed and engineered to be continuously evolved and updated with news and images. The client can easily add and subtract projects and change copy. Such flexibility allows the site to remain fresh and interesting.

One of the key aesthetic decisions Visual Dialogue made was to use images of natural “ground”—dirt, grass, leaves, sedums, etc.—to emphasize the materials the client uses as well as the “green” aspect of Ground’s work. “We try to show a range of imagery—from computer renderings of works in progress to lush photography of finished landscapes,” notes Klaetke.

“It was interesting to look at our client’s competitors’ sites,” says Klaetke. The design of those sites tended to fall into a few camps, he says: 1) the do-it-yourself, amateur-looking site (even for large & successful firms), 2) the Archi-speak sites which have a navel-gazing/grad-school feel, and 3) boring, conservative sites which didn’t express much creativity. “We tried to avoid falling into any of these traps.” As a result of working on the website together, Ground and Visual Dialogue are now collaborating on a public art commission right in Klaetke’s own neighborhood—Boston’s South End. Terry Lee Stone

VISUAL DIALOGUE | CREATIVE DIRECTOR/ART DIRECTOR: FRITZ KLAETKE | DESIGNERS: FRITZ KLAETKE, JESSE HART | PROGRAMMERS: JESSE HART, CHAD KELLER WRITERS: SHAUNA GILLIES-SMITH, KIRSTEN BRUDEVOLD | CLIENT: GROUND | WWW.VISUALDIAGLOGUE.COM