For the last few months, I’ve been quietly working on something that’s become one of the biggest portfolio projects I’ve ever built.
It started with a simple question.
I was watching Jurassic Park one evening and found myself wondering what Isla Nublar would look like if everything had gone to plan. Not the park from the film, but the park thirty years later. If it was still operating today, what would its website look like? What would it sell? How would it present itself? What would booking a holiday there actually feel like?
I built a homepage to find out.
Then I started asking the same question about other films.
Before long, one website had become seven.
Movieverse was born. Inside a streaming-service-style portal, Movieverse lets you explore seven distinct online movie worlds, namely Jurassic Park, The Truman Show, Jaws, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Purge, and King Kong Lives.
Each site showcases a common modern use case (e.g. corporate events site, theme park homepage), set in the universe of its respective movie. Across the seven movie sites (and the hub), Movieverse combines modern (and retro!) web design, video, graphic design, audio & music, and interactivity to create a distinct world-building extension of each movie.
Rather than creating fan sites or film retrospectives, I wanted to build websites that felt like they existed inside their fictional movie worlds. The idea was always to treat them like real businesses, real organisations and real places. If Cyberdyne Systems had a website before Skynet, what would it look like? If there was a portal for actors hoping to be on The Truman Show, how would they present it? If The Purge had become a normal annual event, what would shopping for it look like?
Each site is a functioning, website portfolio project built for modern website use cases, but each also became an exercise in world-building.
The obvious details were the easy part. The enjoyable part was everything underneath. Researching architecture, finding the right typography, recreating branding that felt authentic to each universe, writing copy that sounded like it belonged there, designing products that would never exist in the real world, and occasionally disappearing down very strange rabbit holes, pouring over details that almost nobody will consciously notice (but would notice straight away if they weren’t there).
That’s probably my favourite part of designing anything.
The little things matter.
Sometimes it’s making sure a fictional Southern California theme park actually feels like Southern California. Sometimes it’s imagining how a mascot from a 1993 film would have evolved if a marketing department had been redesigning him every few years. Sometimes it’s deliberately leaving something unsaid because what the visitor imagines is more effective than showing it outright. Those are the details I love.
Movieverse has had me exploring what happens after the credits roll. It’s about treating fictional worlds as though they’re real, and seeing where that takes me as a designer and developer.
Over the coming weeks I’ll be writing about each project individually—where the ideas came from, the challenges behind them, the little details hidden throughout, and some of the dead ends and happy accidents that happened along the way.
For now though, I’m just pleased to finally be able to share it.
I hope you enjoy exploring Movieverse as much as I enjoyed building it.
Ready for your close-up? Step into Movieverse
