Building a gaming site loud enough for the games it represents.
Wired Productions wanted a new website that could promote its catalogue to players, attract developers and give the internal team far more freedom over a content-heavy, multilingual platform.
A complex publishing website that still needed to feel like an arcade, not a CMS.
The audience ranged from gamers to development studios, while the site itself needed to support games, news, shop areas and large volumes of content.
Wired also wanted unusually high editorial flexibility, including layout, colour and font control, plus translation into around 20 languages.
Solve the structure before turning up the neon.
Form defined the sitemap, navigation and user journeys before moving into page design.
The content architecture had to support a large and regularly changing publishing catalogue without becoming difficult for the team to maintain.
Build the moving parts without making the CMS painful.
The site was developed using HTML, CSS and JavaScript with subtle animation to keep the experience energetic.
Back-end functionality, translations, SEO foundations and content entry were handled as part of the build.
Make it bright. Then make it consistent.
The client wanted a neon, 1980s-arcade-inspired visual direction. Form used the homepage to establish that style before extending it across the remaining page types.
Access to Wired’s game artwork meant the site could feel highly visual without relying on generic imagery.
A highly editable publishing site that still behaves like a piece of the Wired brand.
The finished platform combines a distinctive gaming aesthetic with the content-management flexibility needed by a busy international publisher.
