aditus foundation wanted to create an archive to capture the memories of the Malta protests that occurred between November 2019 and January 2020. They asked the public to submit any photos and videos captured during the protests.
With this online repository we wanted to convey the feelings of the protestors during those events, while providing a historical account of what took place.
With over 500 submissions — roughly 400 photos and 100 videos — we didn’t want to create a resource-heavy experience. An important aspect of our design solution was to create a fast experience and limit the strain on the user’s data usage. We solved this in three ways: pagination, featured assets, and Vimeo hosted videos.
Pagination
Each date is automatically loaded when the previous date reaches the end. This meant that the resources were only loaded when needed and the user didn’t have to wait for the entire web page to load before being able to interact with it.
Featured assets
We, along with the client, selected a subset of photos and videos to feature per date. The remaining assets were only loaded if the user navigated to them through the additional assets link.
Vimeo hosted videos
Using Vimeo to host the videos allowed us to take advantage of their optimisations and CDN (Content Delivery Networks), reducing the storage expense for the client and data usage for the user. We generated GIFs from the videos as previews, enhancing the experience and limiting page weight.
Each date had its own hyperlink, allowing users to jump to, or share, a particular date without having to scroll through all the previous ones.
We used wearegoat for a project which was extremely close to our heart, a mix of advocacy and art. They understood the brief right away, and their response time was second to none. We are extremely proud of the result, and they should be too!