One of the most important challenges over the 13 years of history of Ecosistema Urbano has been to communicate what we do in a readable and attractive way. However, in everyday work, the priority has always been the urgent, immediate projects, so we kept postponing the time for making a structured presentation of our professional activity online.
This “EU portfolio” task has been present in all of our task management meetings, always at the end of the “to do list”. But that’s over!
The Ecosistema Urbano Portfolio: What we do
We have finally put ourselves to the task with dedication and we are pleased to present our portfolio: a selection of our works and proposals, showing pictures, diagrams, plans, related links to publications, etc … A selection that, while not yet complete, is organized by categories, tags and years, making navigation more effective.
From now on, from our home page www.ecosistemaurbano.com or from the header of this blog, you can access www.ecosistemaurbano.com/portfolio. And this is more or less what you will find:
We carried an internal research on portfolio sites we liked, and as a result we have gone for a responsive layout, an adaptable grid structure showing all the projects at once, plus a sidebar menu, where you can find the main information about our firm as well as 3 different navigation systems:
- A general classification of projects by types
- A more specific classification according to themes
- A yearly index
We have chosen this simple web structure with the aim of keeping it updated (which, so far, we are managing to do!), and of course the website is a “work in progress” itself. This way, we didn’t have to wait til all the contents were uploaded to make it public. We have uploaded so far 20 of our most relevant works, but we plan to add more in the months to come, so that you can get an overall impression of “what we do”.
We invite you to check some of the presentation sections on the sidebar menu, that have been recently updated:
- About us is a complete presentation of Ecosistema Urbano, who we are and what we do.
- On Articles + Papers you can read some of our written contributions to international architecture magazines and other publications.
- Under the label Publications you can see where our projects have been published so far and have access to previews of some of these publications.
- You can also take a look to the Lectures + Exhibitions and Education + Workshops sections for more information (including related links to most of them).
Linkable, downloadable
We find the typical architect’s portfolio websites, usually made in Flash (a legacy from the ’90s, but still very common), quite frustrating. They don’t allow you to link to a specific project, and forget about downloading an image! With such limitations the message of those websites is a clear “keep your hands off my stuff”… and we do want you to get your hands on our staff!
So we have made sure you will be able to easily link to any project, year, tag or category (or even a specific image), to view the images in a good resolution, and to download them.
Reconnecting our online presence
When designing the poftfolio page we noticed something else: On top of all our websites (about, portfolio, blog, video channel), we were missing a way to link and navigate between them.
Now we have tried to address this issue by creating a common header syle for all the sites, which includes a menu with links and a changing color that matches the ones displayed in our main page: ecosistemaurbano.com.
We hope you enjoy it! And please, feel free to make any comments on it, we will appreciate your feedback. Thank you!
