Introducing Our New Website

Say Hello to Part Time Evil’s New Look!

After months of deliberation, design, and development, we recently launched a transformation of our website. Our goal was to showcase the skills and spirit of our team here at Part Time Evil (PTE). 

We aimed to communicate our strengths: AR / VR / XR strategy, design, and development, creative 3D thinking, and enthusiastic collaboration. We also wanted to showcase our team’s diversity and wealth of talents, so the website’s design includes elements from each and every one of us.

Getting Started

We decided to approach this project as if we were creating a fresh 2D web experience for a client. Our UI/UX designer, Stella, recruited individuals who had never heard of or worked with us before to complete usability tasks and provide overall branding and website-specific feedback. She also analyzed the websites of competitors and firms operating in adjacent spaces and summarized the entirety of her findings with actionable short and long term recommendations. 

Stella’s research revealed that while users felt our name, logo, and overall branding were appropriately “edgy” and “futuristic,” they consistently expressed that the old website didn’t properly convey our capabilities, services, or mission. 

This left us with a pretty clear path forward - one that wasn’t as simple as just updating a website - but a path forward nonetheless. 

Casting our Characters

Unsurprisingly, our primary goal for the redesign was to make our capabilities, services, and mission as clear as possible. Our secondary aim was to make sure our creativity and values jumped out at every opportunity. 

First impressions matter so we paid a lot of attention to the home page video loop. We certainly subscribe to the concept of “show, don’t tell,” but we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do both.

The “We Are ___” component of the loop is our way of communicating as directly as possible about our services and capabilities without putting ourselves in a too-small box. Siri, one of our multi-talented artists, kicked off the “show” component by designing friendly (and adorable) characters to represent the breadth and depth of talent on our team.

We didn’t want the “show” to end after the home page, so we also commissioned artist Karina to take our headshots and turn them into team portraits at the intersection of fun and evil. She beautifully morphed our likenesses into a synchronous gallery with just a splash of mischief.

We loved it all so much we had her keep going and draw versions of a few staged photos in the new style. And finally, we asked her to make one of herself:

To see more of Karina’s work including work in progress videos from our commissions, check out her instagram.

Challenges & Preparing for Launch

At times, we got a mite too ambitious with what we wanted on the site. We had plans for charts and graphs, an interactive timeline, a custom budget calculator... We were excited! But we learned where to draw the line to ensure we could provide the best experience possible within our time and budget constraints. We squeezed in quite a few fun elements but we still have a healthy list of ideas for improvement down the line.

During the build process we experimented and buffed up the user experience. Initially we had the content spread out across many different pages (such as the “team” section having its own page). We soon realized it wouldn’t be fun for visitors to click through a bunch of menus and links to navigate the site. So we condensed a lot to allow people to scroll through the content, which is far more enjoyable than opening new pages.

Traditional websites aren’t quite our forte, so we took a “learn as you go” approach. There were some hiccups with formatting text and symbols – sometimes the code wouldn’t cooperate right away with our designs and concepts. We also experienced a few bugs like anchor link failures and scaling issues. But through continued testing, experimenting, and iteration we (hopefully) have the whole site functioning like a dream. 

The new website represents our collective team effort, which is what we do best at Part Time Evil. We hope you love it as much as we do!

- The Part Time Evil Team