dynamo london

I felt I should draw attention to the new Fabrica website. Strangely, the new site was NOT designed by the Fabrica Interactive team, headed by Andy Cameron. Apparently this new site has been designed by the newfangled 'Fabrica Development Team'. Perhaps Daniel Hirschmann (ex Fabrica webmaster, and co-founder of Fabricanti.com) can tell us more.

Briefly, for those of you who don't know. Fabrica is a Creative Design Think-Tank in Treviso, Italy. It offers year-long fellowships to a selection of young artists from around the world. It was founded by Luciano Benetton and Oliviero Toscani in 1996 and it is part of the Benetton company.

The new website is radically different from what was before. As with any organisation's web re-design, I know there has been some controversial internal reactions to the changes. Both Helder Araújo and Juliana Loh (ex-Fabrica members) drew my attention to the new website, when they both commented on it in our mailing list correspondence. I'd love it if they, or others, would like to offer their opinions publicly here.

As part of the Fabrica "alumni" myself, I quite like the new site. Selfishly, I like it because it offers me the opportunity to keep my profile updated and keep in contact with people. Whereas the old site offered no such facilities. The network of Fabrica is maturing and growing and it feels more and more important to recognize and connect each generation. Which, is a philosophy behind many of today's most-used sites (facebook springs to mind).

I suspect a lot of what keeps the site dynamic, is user-generated content from spin-off sites such as www.fabricanti.com and fabricanti.com/wiki/index.php. (But perhaps I'm mistaken, please do correct me if I'm wrong).

The interface can be tricky to grasp at first. However, my bet, is that this is intentional. The 'Projects Section' impressively opens it's own browser inside the site. This is initially a bit disorientating, but it is a system which I quickly understood (although I doubt someone less web-savvy, like say, my Mum would have the aptitude or patience for).

Concerning the navigation, interestingly, each box that opens from the main menu stays open. So you have multiple boxes open at one time. This fills the otherwise odd amount of blank white space on the home page, and leaves a nice visual history of all the info you've encountered. This wouldn't work for all types of site, but Fabrica has kept all text short and to-the-point. It is like site made of a bullet points. This minimal design is brave and it has an ethos I can sympathize with, but it does seam to leave out a lot of the substance that makes Fabrica famous. The site could feel slightly shallow, and I'm left wanting to see more work, more projects, more photographs. Fabrica (and Benetton) have always been image driven brands. It is a pity there isn't more images on this site.

There is a valid argument that says: Fabrica has produced stunning work over the last 10 years, and it should show it off. But then again, I'm tempted to argue: why should Fabrica's website be condemned to a role of archiving and displaying? It isn't a glass exhibition cabinet.

On a personal note, I'm going to see how I feel about this site when its been around a bit longer. I think it might be a grower.