The Imaginarium had outgrown its one-page website. I was given the freedom to rethink it from the ground up, designing and building a new digital home that could showcase its growing slate of productions, people and pioneering performance capture work.
The Imaginarium had grown into a much broader production company, with an expanding slate spanning film and television alongside its pioneering performance capture work. Its digital presence still reflected a much earlier version of the business, leaving much of that work and the people behind it without a proper place to be discovered
A single page featuring just two productions could no longer represent The Imaginarium’s growing body of work
There was nowhere to discover the team, studio or pioneering performance capture capabilities
The experience no longer reflected the scale, ambition or cinematic identity of The Imaginarium
We are very happy with the website Josh designed and built for us. The site reflects our brand and ethos beautifully and we’re thrilled with how it turned out. Thank you!
The Imaginarium already had everything the website needed to feel distinctive: incredible imagery, recognisable productions and a strong cinematic identity. Rather than designing around those assets, I made them the centre of the experience, using large-scale imagery, movement and interaction to let the work do most of the talking.
With only the original logo retained, I redesigned The Imaginarium’s website from the ground up. I established a new visual direction, rethought the site architecture and shaped how visitors discover and explore the studio’s work. From navigation and content hierarchy to responsive layouts, reusable components and interactions, I created a cohesive experience across the entire website.
The Imaginarium already had extraordinary visual material, so the website didn’t need to compete with it.
I treated each production more like a piece of art direction, using its own imagery, colour and atmosphere to shape the experience while a restrained framework kept the wider site unmistakably Imaginarium.
I wanted the website to feel connected to their work on screen from the moment it loaded, so I brought the same logo animation audiences see at the start of their films and shows into the site.
I extracted and rebuilt the animation so it was fully transaprent for the hero of the site in After Effects, then added custom code to ensure it plays reliably on every visit. A small detail, but one that immediately connects the digital experience to the brand people already recognise on screen.
Rather than presenting a growing catalogue as a static list on the homepage, I used movement and changing scale to make exploring the work feel more cinematic.
Featured productions animate into view as you scroll, creating moments of discovery and giving each story space to make an impression.The interaction adds energy without getting in the way, helping a large body of work feel curated rather than crowded.
With a growing catalogue of productions to explore, I wanted the main projects menu’s browsing to feel engaging without getting in the way. Each project card responds to the cursor with subtle 3D movement and a shifting highlight, giving the artwork a sense of depth and physicality.
It’s a small interaction that rewards exploration while keeping the production itself firmly centre stage.
The cinematic layouts created a practical challenge: standard responsive cropping could easily cut the stars out of the scene. Rather than compromise the artwork, I built each composition from multiple responsive layers.
Characters remain fully visible while backgrounds adapt independently to fill the available space, preserving the intended composition at every resolution. One system, rather than manually art-directing every screen size.
It was an absolute pleasure working with Josh, he completely understood our brief from the outset and built a site better than we imagined. Every step of the build was well thought-out with incredibly slick design and clever ideas. We look forward to continuing our relationship and recommend him highly to anyone looking for website builds.
I first saw Andy Serkis as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, my favourite film series, when I was 10, so getting the chance years later to design and build a website for his production company felt pretty surreal.
The team gave me a huge amount of creative freedom to experiment with the design, motion and interactions, which made this one of those rare projects that was as much fun to make as it was challenging. It’s still one I’m particularly proud of, and our relationship has continued ever since, with me returning each year to update and evolve the site as the studio and its body of work grows.
