CLIENT
International Space Federation
year
2025
role
Creative Direction, UX, Front End Design
The International Space Federation is a research organization working at the frontier of energy and gravity science — bringing together physicists, academics, investors, and innovators. Their previous site was built in the early 2010s and reflected it: a blog-centric structure, design conventions from a different era, and a visual presentation that made it hard for anyone outside the academic community to understand why this work mattered. The core problem wasn't cosmetic. ISF was struggling to build credibility beyond the physics community — which affected their ability to attract the investors and non-academic partners the work needed to advance. The site needed to do something their existing presence couldn't: make people feel the significance of what was being researched, not just describe it.
Design Inspiration
Horizon inspiration for gradients used on the site
In thinking about design references, I was brought back to what "space" represents: the logic of darkness. Using black and deep gray as primary backgrounds, which shifts the register from informational to immersive. You're not reading about space. You're in it. The experience I wanted to create was closer to science fiction in its sense of scale and intrigue than to an academic website. Not in a way that was dishonest about the work, but in a way that communicated that what ISF is researching is genuinely extraordinary. The site architecture was rebuilt to support that: nine navigation items collapsed to five, the homepage rebuilt around a single clear introduction to the organization, and the content strategy shifted away from blog posts toward research papers and institutional assets that actually build credibility with serious audiences.
The interaction I'm most satisfied with is the wormhole sequence on the homepage. A video element of a wormhole plays in the background as the user scrolls. At a defined point text appears as the user scrolls, giving the sense that the user has entered the wormhole rather than simply scrolled past it. When the sequence completes, the page releases and normal scrolling resumes. All interaction behaviors — the WebGL effects, the parallax animations, the mouse-responsive depth — were defined by me in Figma and translated into the WordPress build by the front-end developer I collaborated with. The wormhole sequence, the motion logic, the scroll triggers: all of it was specified in the design before a line of code was written. That specificity is what made the final build match the intent.
Hover interactions
Cards for team members
Rebuilding the navigation from nine items to five sounds like a small decision. In practice it was the clearest signal that the entire project was working, because it required ISF to agree that some of what they had built their site around was getting in the way of what they were trying to communicate. That kind of structural clarity is harder to arrive at than a visual direction.