BASIK GROUP
Created to showcase the unique and lavish new condominiums of 290 Mulberry Street in New York City’s relatively recently named “Nolita” neighborhood, this is really a site for people who are passionate about new ideas of form and function in architecture and design. As those disciplines continue to reinvent themselves in all sorts of innovative and exciting ways, the websites that speak to this audience face increasingly difficult challenges in staying ahead of the herd.

“SHoP [architectural contributor to the 290 Mulberry project] came to us with these terrific and crazy illustrations of punk/manga streetscapes and asked us to make a website using them,” says Basik Group’s creative director, Hal Siegel. The Basik team’s function was interaction design. “As such,” he says, “our goal was to create an interface that brought the streetscapes to life while being as transparent as possible.”

Right off the bat the design team veered away from anything that might burden the message in any way, deliberately avoiding design features that require the words skip or skip intro. As Siegel points out, so many real-estate marketing sites just take way too long. “We hear this concern all the time from our clients, and so we are particularly sensitive to it,” he says. The site was built using Adobe CS3, SiteX and Basik’s custom Flash framework. While Siegel recognizes how easy it can be to get carried away with Flash, he and his colleagues tailored the site to strike just the right bal­ance of ‘cool factor’ with immediacy and ease-of-use. “At the end of the day,” he says, “we are still selling a product.”

What they ended up with is proof that having a lot of ‘cooks in the kitchen’ can work out quite well, providing all of those cooks like the same spices. In this case, they did. “From the outset, SHoP and CORE [marketing contributor to 290 Mulberry] asked us to push the envelope on this project, and we were very happy to oblige,” Siegel says.

The site’s stylish streetscape illustrations were intended to bring a fresh approach to real-estate marketing. The goal was to present a site at once fresh and distinctive, while being very careful to avoid anything remotely gimmicky. The subtle use of layers on the main interface gives the site its distinctive spatial feel, which pleased the client and partners to no end. “People either get it or they don’t,” says Siegel. “The ones that get it are the audience.” R. Ashby

BASIK GROUP | CREATIVE DIRECTOR: HAL SIEGEL | DESIGNER: SHELLY SUZUKI | PROGRAMMER: MIKE BARBORAK | PROJECT MANAGER: NATHAN SIEGEL | ILLUSTRATIONS: SHOP ARCHITECTS MARKETING: CORE GROUP | RENDERINGS: JARRETT BOOR | PROJECT ART DIRECTOR: ALAN HILL DESIGN | CLIENT: CARDINAL INVESTMENTS | WWW.BASIKGROUP.COM