A stylish digital amalgamation of fashion, gaming & anime culture

Build in Amsterdam - a Dutch branding agency specialised in e-commerce - created a new brand identity and digital flagship store for ARK/8 - a luxury streetwear brand with roots in London and Tokyo. Inspired by sci-fi movies, anime and video games. Morphing these three worlds seamlessly into one fully immersive destination.

Who is ARK/8?

ARK/8 is a luxury streetwear brand with a dream to fuse high fashion and entertainment. Celebrating the beautiful art of gaming, anime and pop culture.

They strive for the highest standard in fabrics, manufacturing and design. Strongly believing that durability of design and the way garments are made are the best way to tackle overconsumption and waste. They reuse and recycle wherever they can. 

ARK/8's design philosophy is to blend the old with the new, the timeless with the hype, and ultimately build pieces that you will cherish for a very long time. 

The output by Build in Amsterdam

Build in Amsterdam provided strategic guidance, art direction and design services for overall brand development, as well as technical production and creative content direction for the new ark8.net. Merging two very different worlds: high fashion and cyberculture into a design language that can evolve and grow with the brand and its various collections.

They created a shape-shifting logotype - a font-based logo that focuses on the ARK/8 business name alone - and an infinity sign monogram. The typefaces that were selected are timeless with a touch of retro, and paired with sharp, angular shapes reminiscent of a video game interface layout.

Behind the brief 

The agency's associate creative director Margot Gabel worked closely with the ARK/8 founder Dimitri van Eetvelde. Deep diving into what cyberculture really means.

A lot of research was done. Video game screenshots were captured. And inspiration was gathered from movie sequences and sets, game stats like Pokedex and old Xbox operating systems, as well as from famous neo-futurist concept artist Syd Mead. 

The outcome: a morphing destination where you can truly lose yourself. This was then also translated into the overall brand identity, UI language, content direction, packaging lines and more.

Content creation for ark8.net

The core of ark8.net is the Product Detail Page (PDP). Here the characters (models) are the true hero of the layout. It captures the visual essence of video game character selection screens. 

Build in Amsterdam wanted to adopt certain poses and attitudes. These were first developed and explained in extensive guidelines. Being present during the e-commerce photoshoot also ensured that the results would perfectly fit into the platform. For example, on set they would regularly test the shots directly in Figma mockups of the website. 

Build in Amsterdam always strives to create and curate content that complements their design vision for their clients.

Design process

The agency strived for animations that are subtle, feel futuristic, but still familiar. Therefore, it was important for the team of developers to be involved from the early stages of the project: prototyping and testing animation to align with the brand's unique aesthetic. 

Cross-pollination between dev & design was encouraged, and resulted in numerous micro-interactions bringing layouts to life: panels morph into place when opened, transitions can glitch, and text appears in a staggered way as a minimalistic reinterpretation of early computer graphical interfaces.

Build in Amsterdam used the following tech stack: Next.js as framework, Shopify as e-commerce service, GSAP for the masks, Framer Motion for all animations, Styled-components for styling, Storybook for component view/presentation, and Storyblok for CMS.

Resulting in this stylish amalgamation of fashion, gaming, pop and anime culture. High five to Build in Amsterdam.

An e-commerce platform with a fitting aesthetic. Applied with playful details. Everything complements the product nicely!
Erick de Jong - Dutch Digital Design curator & creative director, Fonk

Awards

• Site of the Day - Awwwards

• Dev Award - Awwwards

• Ecommerce Design Award

• Featured on Numero Magazine