Sub[text]
Website Design & Layout
Sub[text] is a network of archivists, librarians, artists, and producers offering research services to film and audio documentarians. They had an existing web presence, but it wasn't doing justice to what they were offering.
The brief I set was: a single-page site that told potential clients exactly what Sub[text] does, who it's for, how it works, and how to reach them. For a specialist service selling expertise and trust, simplicity was the right register.
The hero image (see image above) was the most considered decision: two circular image crops, edited to read as a pair of binoculars. A small visual joke that matches the network’s tagline "Detective for your Docs," and signals immediately that this is a team with a point of view, not just a service provider.
The existing copy was reorganised into three distinct sections, each defining a different use case for their services—archival research, gathering people's stories, and fact-checking. Breaking it up this way made the offering legible without diluting it.
For the visual language, I kept the rose and warm brown already in their palette and introduced colour blocking to create rhythm on what is otherwise a text-heavy page. A dark background anchored the sections to evoke the feeling of a cinema, or the particular darkness of an archive, where you go into the dim to retrieve something.
Stock images were selected for their stillness and contemplative atmosphere, and for the feeling of careful, unhurried work in a research environment.