Bringing Windows 98' back

Tom Abbosh is the Producer, Director, and Writer behind Another Footnote. A video production company based in the UK.

We found each other on Contra. He was looking to finally use his domain (www.anotherfootnte.com) to showcase his work, and I was eager to help.

The brief brief

On our first call, Tom was super clear about what he needed and wanted.

He wanted his site to look like an old windows pc where his projects would be sitting as windows on the desktop. Simple.

Initial exploration: Ok, but a bit too literal

At first, I shared initial mocks and concepts for the portfolio. I went full-on to remembering those old days. Even kept dial-up internet sound playing in the background to bring me back to those 90's vibes. And so I came up with some screens and proposed interaction. Unfortunately, this wasn't exactly what Tom was looking for.

Style guide

After sharing initial mocks and realigning on his expectations, I started work and shared Moodboard and Style Guide. Some tweaks were made in the process until we ended up with something like so

Some additional explorations

I applied the style guide knowing I was on the right track. No opening and closing windows. More like the desktop view of a very organized multitasker. And so I went on to design that concept in Figma.

Final mocks

From that explorations, we could see that the elements we had thought of are awesome but we will need to make some of those windows to keep symmetry. Then I went ahead and added color to the background of each project to make it a bit more interesting to look at. And this was the final result.

Tom wanted his portfolio to look like the screen of death that would be a single-pager mega scroll. Each project has a dedicated window that contains 3 images, a title, and a brief description of what it was all about. So that's what I set to deliver.

Thanks so much for this. You have been fantastic so far. Very professional and impressive work!

Let's make this baby live

Once the design was finalized and approved I moved to Webflow and worked really hard to make it pop.