New Website Design
“Simplicity is a difficult thing to achieve” is one of our favourite Chaplin quotes here at the Chaplin Office and we hope this new version of our website brings it closer to such a goal.
Our first concern was to enhance its very rich content: inspired by the best blogging platforms (like Medium), we removed all distracting elements from our articles, increased the font size and, last but not least, added hundreds of contextual images with captions to offer you a much more focused and pleasurable reading experience.
We also wanted to bring the content to light. Our website has some 200 articles, and in the previous version of our website, they were buried under layers of 4 or 5 mouse clicks. It was a real shame - considering the short attention span of the Internet, that was equivalent to their being virtually nonexistent!
Now, under the new Media menu, song lyrics, the speech from The Great Dictator, film synopses, and many other articles are all just one or two clicks away. In the same vein, our Films section now includes a page per film, on which all of the content (descriptions, videos, articles, lyrics, etc.) relevant to each particular film is much more easily reachable.
We hope that the Films section’s new design offers an inviting “screening” space, where you can (re)discover over 75 film excerpts, trailers & rare archival footage from our Youtube channel, but proposed and sorted within the context of each film, and no trolls or lolcats to distract you! The videos can also be easily found in the Media section.
Many of the videos and articles on the website have only recently been added, such as Lisa Stein Haven’s hitherto unpublished interview with the late Julian Ludwig, who played a small part in Limelight, so do browse around. We will of course continue adding articles, blog posts, videos, new products, etc. with time.
Finally, the design has been brought down to a bare minimum with a black and white colour frame to remain consistent with much of Chaplin’s work. Though we liked the previous homepage design, we feel Chaplin speaks for himself, even in the silence of a black and white photograph - there’s no need to dress him up with fancy colours and icons: simplicity is key.
We can only adhere to that :-)
