New Client Project: The Rivalry Website

A sleek a minimal site for the branding and interface design studio based in New York and Minneapolis

The Rivalry is a two man design shop based out of New York (Jesse) and Minneapolis (Andy). The bulk of their work are branding and interface designs for big and small companies alike. Nike, Airbnb, and Yuga Labs are notable clients of their digital work. However, they are most known for and associated with Google’s Material Design. I first met them when I worked at Google. In 2011, they were vendors working on what would eventually become Material Design.

A grid of project thumbnails on the Rivalry's new website

Since 2020, I have sporadically been doing work with them. Some of the JavaScript libraries I have shared in the past are, in fact, derivatives of briefs I explored with The Rivalry. Most of the work we have done together is exploratory and ultimately private. But, last summer they asked me if I could help build out their new site. They had a beautiful and minimal design that I loved. They also were interested to reduce the complexity to maintain the site.

I proposed building a microservice on top of Google Cloud that allowed them to drag and drop image files to a folder in Cloud Storage. This microservice listens to changes in that folder and extracts a bunch of information about the image, including: the client, category, dimensions, permalink, and placeholder background color. It stores this information in a separate file that is served from the same Cloud Storage as a CDN. It ends up being a simple, effective, and cheap way to manage the website without a CMS.

Google’s Cloud Storage website allows for drag-n-drop files. We use Cloud Storage as a CMS.

Fast-forward to today and the site is live! I am thrilled to share it because this project demonstrates form and function, two predominant roles in the design process. The form of this project is a website. It is a direct and elegant way to show off the variety of work The Rivalry has produced over the last two decades. To compliment the form, is a simple and more importantly functional interface to manage image files and extract necessary information when images are added or modified.

This is possible by creatively using off-the-shelf enterprise solutions.

I am taking May off. But, I am available to schedule collaborations for Summer, Fall, and beyond.

—Jono