MEET is the first International Digital Culture Center in Milan, Italy. The organization brings together creative ideas and innovative projects with the mission of reducing the “digital divide” and promoting active participation through conferences and inclusive programming. As part of a comprehensive rebranding effort, Pentagram Partner Giorgia Lupi and her former team at Accurat transformed MEET’s vast multimedia archive into a wholly reimagined digital platform.
Formerly known as “Meet the Media Guru” or “MTMG,” the organization established the partnership with Fondazione Cariplo in 2018 that made the rebranding possible. Paolo Iabichino, Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy Italy, directed the brand transformation. Paolo brought together a stellar team of experts to guide the transition and worked side-by-side with Lupi and team during the overhaul of the center’s digital identity.
Lupi and her team conceptualized, designed, and developed MEET’s new online presence. The core of the design concept for the website is a data-driven, searchable timeline that brings together videos, events, articles, and other historical content. The interface paints a rich picture of the center’s many activities and invites exploration of different perspectives. All contents, regardless of format, are classified by multiple criteria in a database driven by a custom search engine.
The design team conceived a responsive layout and a color-coding and tagging system to identify the different types of media and data. Depending on the user’s selection of filters, the colored blocks of information dynamically rearrange over the timeline. In this way, the site produces an infinite variety of visualizations and invites users to explore the archive while enjoying a colorful, ever-changing online experience.
The digital design team started the project with an in-depth effort to map and classify the archive content. Next, the designers imagined and developed the digital experience directly around this invaluable and ever-evolving asset. The team used the structure and richness of the material and the corresponding tagging system to drive the information architecture organically. Lastly, the designers refined the user interface to reflect the visual themes of the center’s new branding.
The visual timeline redefines the presentation of results of a web search: the output dynamically evolves in front of the user’s eyes. In one instant, it mirrors a library bookshelf, appearing like a dense and colorful visual tapestry. In the next, it becomes a field of monolithic blocks of color, transforming the interface into a brutalist manifesto for a new digital culture. A fitting reflection of MEET’s mission, the online experience is both an expressive and inclusive representation of the institutional brand and offering.
