Responses by Will Miller, design director; and Matt Soria, developer, Firebelly Design.

Background: The new R2.me is a portfolio site that puts the real estate firm’s work front and center. Designed to give potential investors, brokers and lessees just enough information to initiate contact, the site is intentionally streamlined to elevate R2’s record of success as well as the team’s experience and expertise.

Design core: Subtle motion and interactions help bring R2’s work to life, adding depth to each project while playing up the sophistication of the minimalist new brand. Case studies are rich and interactive, with drone-shot looping videos that set the mood and before/after sliders that clearly show how R2 transforms its raw spaces.

Favorite details: Partnering with Spirit of Space for video footage really elevated things. While case studies and projects have a sketchy, loose and formative feel, the inclusion of video helps flesh out big ideas and renderings, giving an altogether confident, more concrete sense of impact.

Knowing that video can slow down page load, we implemented a simple loading animation that looks very much at home with the rest of the site’s style as well. The simplified navigation is another point of pride—we worked closely with the client to keep the site streamlined and goal-oriented, making for a friendlier user experience.

Challenges: With R2 ramping up its marketing efforts and plans to develop more content, we needed to ensure the site would have room to grow while maintaining the streamlined look and feel. We took a formalized, yet fluid approach to layouts, balanced flexibility with aesthetic sensibility, and structured the CMS to provide healthy constraints and ease of use. On a more granular level, creating smooth transitions between pages was a challenge we resolved by using swup.js.

New lessons: Over the course of this project, we started updating our front-end dev process, switching from a basic Gulp setup to using Laravel-mix, so we learned a new way to code JavaScript—which was a huge improvement.