Responses by Guillaume Morisseau, front-end developer, Murmure.

Background: This event site presents the 2021 season of the Caen-based performance space Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen en Normandie (CCN) to the public. We worked with director Alban Richard and the team at CCN to rethink their communication around an adapted approach that was more digital, more flexible and more appropriate to the situation of the fairly exceptional year of 2020 for the cultural community.

Design core: We used a deliberately raw style, calling for a certain “return to basics,” whether in our behavior, in our consumption or in our design. This site presents a whole section of brutalism and reductionism that we wanted to explore. What appealed to us about this idea was that it involved the visitor in their discovery of the 2021 season and invited them to click, drag and play with the elements without any frills.

We also loved working with type designer Jean-Baptiste Morizot’s Bluu. Typography is very important in our projects.

Challenges: Using Matter.js—a 2-D physics engine—with multiple classic HTML elements, images, videos, SVGs and typography. But the site is now easily manageable if the CCN’s programming changes. We also applied this experiment to mobile devices using the gyroscope, which further multiplies the compositional possibilities of this technique.

New lessons: The use of Matter.js was a first for Murmure. We hope to do more projects of this kind in the future because the possibilities are very interesting!

Navigation structure: The idea behind the navigation was simplicity, showing only the essentials and letting the visitor have their own experience, either quickly or by taking their time through exploration.

Special technical features: As mentioned above, we used Matter.js as the physical engine to animate the elements, the structure being in HTML/CSS/JavaScript.