Platform for Digital Art

One of my clients came up to me after we were done with a project and told me he wanted a site to represent his home village: Ampass

The client didn't really give us any pointers other than: 1) it should be unique and catchy and 2) it can be anything we want, except illegal stuff. The problem: there's not much going on in Ampass so we had a hard time figuring out what to actually go for when it comes to design. One thing he did mention though was that helping out small artists and / or businesses is one of his hobbies.

Taking matters in our own hands, we decided to create a landing page that focuses on featuring other local projects (or the client's own business ventures).

This project quickly turned out to be a fun challenge for our team because there was basically no client input.

We quickly landed on the one (and only) landmark of Ampass: its medieval plague column as our main branding element. Plague columns were erected as a sort of thanksgiving for the ending of the a plague. Austria has many such columns, but Ampass uses it in it's city crest.

Seeing these little "windows" on top of the plague column, we came up with the idea of using this pillar as a spinning navigation element. We looked up a few high-res details, drove to the village to check the pillar out in person and got straight to modeling in blender.

As you spin the 3D model, new projects are shown as a Decal (2D sprite on top of the 3D mesh). These sprites show the logo and project name and are clickable. This makes Ampass act as a directory for local artists and technical people looking to feature their projects.

We collaborated with local artists, university students and other local entities to get their sites featured on Ampass.