Responses by Joshua Allen and Valerio Mance, cofounders, Think Big Studio.
Background: We’re called Think Big Studio, so we felt our own website should prove that we actually think big. We’re a new independent studio in Sydney working across branding, packaging, websites, photography and film. That makes it surprisingly difficult to build one site that represents everything without feeling like five different websites stuck together.
Our audience is still quite broad, particularly small- and medium-sized businesses that need creative work. We haven’t settled on one niche yet, and we didn’t want to pretend we had. The site is often the first thing a potential client sees, so we wanted people to get a sense of how we think before they even read what we offer. If we’re designing websites for other people, ours should do some of the talking for us.
Design core: We represented projects as individual 3-D buildings, taking inspiration from the brands and businesses behind them. The central tower is based on Sydney’s Centrepoint Tower, paying homage to the city in which our studio operates out of.
The chrome surfaces are almost blank canvases, making the brands and colors stand out against the baby-blue daytime sky or black night mode. We feel that this contrast combines together for an overall pleasing visual aesthetic. The clouds and brain motif play into thinking and dreaming big. There’s also subtle sound design and little Easter eggs scattered throughout culminating in an immersive, fun experience for the user.
Favorite details: For us, it’s the buildings and how the idea came together. We came up with representing our work through buildings, then the tower came afterwards to tie it all together.
We’re probably most proud that it feels different without becoming impossible to use. Being unique isn’t automatically a good thing. It’s easy to make something strange; making something different that still works is harder.
Challenges: We tend to approach design using first-principles thinking. For this project, we made a conscious effort not to look at traditional landing pages as beautiful as some of these may be, but instead strip everything back and work from what was fundamentally true about what the site needed to achieve. Building the concept from the ground up was probably the biggest challenge.
Navigation structure: We wanted to keep people inside the world. Everything moves at a similar pace, without abrupt jumps between sections. The galleries open within that same world, and you can still see the clouds through almost every page, day or night. That continuity keeps it immersive.
Special navigational features: The billboards on the buildings and tower expand into scrollable pages, and the buildings open project galleries. Going to our work takes you up above the clouds, reinforcing the idea of thinking big through the movement itself.
Technology: We used Blender heavily for the 3-D elements alongside CSS, HTML and JavaScript. We also connected Blender with ChatGPT through a model context protocol server to speed up modeling and iteration.
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