Mobel
ART DIRECTION
BRANDING
Motion
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Mobel distributes Herman Miller and Knoll across Quebec. That's an enviable catalogue and an awkward brand position: every object it sells was designed by someone else, photographed by someone else, and is already more famous than the company selling it. Distributor sites tend to end up as warehouses with a logo in the corner. I took it as the subject for an art direction project during an Awwwards course — a full rebrand and site concept, from research through to motion, with no client and no constraints except the ones I set. The question I set myself: how does a company that sells other people's icons look like a destination rather than a catalogue?
RESEARCH & DIRECTION
I started with a mindmap rather than a moodboard, because I wanted the visual direction to come out of language instead of taste. Everything the brand could plausibly be about — furniture, mobility, Bauhaus, ergonomics, savoir-faire, blueprints, luxury — went down, then got clustered until four words survived: modern, functional, refined, design. Those four ruled out most of what a furniture site usually does. No warmth-and-lifestyle photography, no soft serif, nothing aspirational. They pointed somewhere specific: the Swiss school, where the grid is visible, the type does the arguing, and decoration has to justify itself. The moodboard came second, and confirmed it — International Style posters, hard grids, one accent colour doing structural work.
THE BRAND IDEA
Mobel's own line was already the strategy: spaces where you will learn, work, live. A claim about rooms, not about furniture. I turned it into a code. Each of the three words gets a primitive geometric symbol — a rounded square, a paired ellipse, a circle — and those three shapes become the alphabet everything else is built from: illustration, layout, animation. A visitor never has the code explained, but the site is consistent underneath in a way they can feel. That's the part of the project I'd defend hardest. The brief could have been answered with a good-looking site. Deriving the whole visual language from three words the company already owned is what makes it Möbel's rather than mine.
THE DESIGN SYSTEM
Illustrations. Single-hairline drawings of the furniture, in the Swiss idiom, tracing the history of the form since the 1950s — a Tulip base, a Nelson dome, a Noguchi frame. Reduced to the one profile that makes each piece recognisable. They let the site discuss a chair rather than just display it. Colour. Greys and a warm beige carry the pages; a single orange does everything else, used structurally rather than decoratively. The palette exists to lose to the product photography, which is the loudest thing on every page by design. Type. One geometric sans across a tight scale, sized for hierarchy rather than expression.
WEBSITE & MOTION
The site is built as a scroll narrative rather than a catalogue. The product pages are the clearest case: the Cosm chair arrives as an annotated line drawing — flexible frame, intercept suspension, auto-harmonic tilt — before the photograph appears. You meet the engineering first, then the object. The CTA reads have a seat. In motion, one rule held throughout: it should feel like moving through a room, not scrolling a page. Weighted, slow to settle, nothing that springs. Furniture at this price is bought slowly and the site's pace had to match it. Every sequence had to survive being watched a second time, which rules out most of what looks impressive once. Role Art direction, brand system, illustration, web design, and motion. Self-initiated concept project — not commissioned by or affiliated with Möbel, Herman Miller, or Knoll.