SPOTLIGHTWhat’s on your desktop?
My Moleskine, coloured pens, sticky
notes, half a mug of coffee and my
puppy’s collar.What’s on the walls?
A hanging plant, bookshelf of our
favourite books (including the entire
Book Apart collection!) and a few
awards we wanted to frame.What will you do for lunch?
I’m taking my dog to the groomers
today so I’ll probably pick up some
falafel nearby.What hours do you work?
We work a standard day of 9am-6pm,
with some meetings in the late evening
due to the time difference between us
and our US clients.What else do you do in the
office?
Fight over the Sonos, brainstorm on the
whiteboard, question whether we have
coffee jitters and stroke our dog, Jazz.How often do you all
hang out?
We hang out every day on Slack! It’s
important to us to have weekly team
huddles on video chat where we talk
through what’s going on. As for face to
face, we try get together for
conferences and we’ve also just been on
our latest annual team retreat in
Budapest last month.Describe your office culture in
three words
Positive, collaborative, witty.FRANCESCA VASSILIADES,
DESIGN DIRECTORSurĽoh
CardConnect is a returning client of Series Eight, which takes care of optimising user flows, user interface
design and front-end development
that allow the industry to grow in both a
compliant and technologically advanced
way. Such teams are a great fit for us
because they’re open to new ideas,
creativity and collaboration.
Speaking of which, tell us about your
recent site for Best in Grow.
FV: Best in Grow (bestingrow.io) is a
communication and engagement
platform that connects budtenders,
retail operators and brands in the
emerging legal cannabis industry. They
approached us after they’d had a few
unfortunate experiences with other
design agencies, and called for an
entirely new visual design, built on
Statamic CMS.
We wanted to highlight the unique
offering of their product and the
biggest part of the project was the
illustration and animation work. We
brainstormed and sketched different
concepts and scenarios for each
individual illustration that would explain
the product offering as effectively and
on-brand as possible.
We also developed a design system of
funky, amorphous shapes with a
distinctive colour palette and brought
this professional yet playful feeling to
motion such as hover states and scroll
behaviour. A week after launch, Best in
Grow received countless leads and
comments from customers, interested
parties and journalists.With Forza you addressed the issue of
homophobia in football. What did you
learn during this project?
FV: We teamed up with fan opinion
platform Forza Football and Europe’s
leading charity for LGBT equality,
Stonewall, to showcase the results of
their most recent survey on football
fans’ attitudes towards homophobia in
the sport (lgbt.forza.football). Compared
to the results of the 2014 survey, we can
see there is a growing acceptance
towards LGBT fans and players.
However, the most recent survey
highlights lower scoring countries such
as Russia (which held the World Cup in
2018) at 47 per cent acceptance and
Qatar (holding the World Cup in 2022) at
just 26 per cent acceptance. This proves
why progressive surveys like these are so
significant for encouraging
conversations that can promote positive
change, which will in turn increasingly
make football a safer environment for
LGBT fans and players.
We wanted to present the data in the
clearest way possible to highlight the
importance of the content and create a
more powerful effect when storytelling