This text-only record is part of the interactive AIGA Design Archives where you can view more details, zoom into images and explore other works in the definitive online resource on American design.
 |
Design Category
Information design, 1996
Design firm
Jessica Helfand Studio (New York, New York)
Collection
(1997) Design of Understanding 2
|
Designing a website for a paper company is an oxymoron: how do you represent, in a medium that you can’t touch, a product that by its very nature is meant to be handled? Moreover, while Champion’s audience—from graphic designers to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world who buy and use all kinds of paper, from milk cartons to fax paper—has an eclectic demographic profile that is difficult to reach with a single graphic identity.
But this graphic identity is key to this site: since “navigation” had to appear on every screen, we used the logo itself as a toolbar. The eight-letter word “Champion” serves as a way to categorize information—“company,” “help,” “acreage,” “manufacturing,” “products,” “issues,” “outreach,” and “news”—as well as a steady reminder of the corporate identity. Further subdivisions were enabled through the use of frames technology, which permitted independently scrollable screens.