Client and the challenge:

Rhys Thomas is an Emmy-award-winning director and producer whose work spans hundreds of Saturday Night Live sketches, the cult series Documentary Now!, Hawkeye, a limited series within the Marvel Universe, and commercial work across continents. 

Gallivant doesn't need a website for work. The industry knows them, has seen the work, it is part of the cultural landscape. What they wanted was a place to document the past work on their own terms, open source creativity, done with a dose of humility and a sense of humor.

Approach:

Rhys had compiled what he calls a "Bible": a library of his inspirations, idiosyncrasies, journal entries, and sketches. We took that volume in, made sense of it, and proposed a design concept. Rhys then took the ideas further.

Design principles:

No guidance, let them have fun. 
The range of the work is such that it should not be structured and put in categories. Rather than imposing a particular exploration path, we let visitors have fun with the website. We organized the filmography loosely across pages corresponding to periods and locations: New York, Los Angeles, Europe. But even that felt too prescriptive. Finally we decided to remove the page names entirely and replace them with characters. Rhys created and planted them throughout the website.

Early days of the internet.
The Gallivant ethos draws from the collage energy of Monty Python's animations, David Byrne's zine work, the daring visual culture of the 1970s and early 1980s. The medium now is a website, so we suggested tapping into the energy of the early internet: when there was no right or wrong, when websites could be genuinely strange. We translated this into fixed image backgrounds, pinned text boxes, a bit of scrapbooking, videos styled as desktop items with captions. Rhys then developed original background images for every page using his own photography. The homepage features his photograph of a street sign in his native Welsh.

Rough and imperfect handwriting.
We wanted to reflect the Gallivant style with a typeface that was playful but meticulously crafted. We found Stefan by Dinamo, a digitization of an artist's handwriting with all its inconsistencies, available in two versions: stick drawings and bubbles. Both applied with apparent randomness. Rhys embraced Stefan so fully that he proposed building the logo from it. We collaborated on the composition, mixing letter styles within the wordmark and adapting its color to match the character on each page. For the site texts and film captions, Monument Grotesk, also by Dinamo, styled as early computer system type.