Ryder Ripps isn’t impressed by today’s web design. “There’s too many ego bros who want to make the next big start-up,” he explains. “They just all copy each other.” Ripps, co-founder of OKFocus, one of today’s most exciting digital design studios, is referring to the West Coast start-ups – the current crop of quick-to-be-financed, over-hyped internet businesses.

His studio, OKFocus, based on New York’s Long Island City, is a world away from all this. The studio approaches web design with a playful enthusiasm. Its style is lo-fi rather than high-tech. It’s cut-and-pasted together and unafraid to be left rough around the edges. “I like to think the user navigation of a website can be like your backpack in high school, with buttons and patches,” explains Ripps. “It’s kind of boring to have design patterns without expression.”


Knowing that people are most likely to look at your internet thing for less than a minute before going back to refreshing Facebook or playing with their cat makes taking risks seem easier. OKFocus is born of New York’s current fashion scene, a small-scale yet impactful design movement rooted in bold, brash design, and championed by brands such as Hood by Air and Opening Ceremony. OKFocus’s role within this community is that of the online designer, having created much of the scene’s digital identity. For a start, OKFocus was founded during the creation of <V Magazine>’s V Files – when Ripps met fellow designers Jonathan Vingiano and Jules LaPlace – an online destination that reports on the places and people within the scene. They also developed an app for BeenTrill, a music collective that often provides the scene’s soundtrack.  

The bold style of OKFocus is in part the result of its observation that people, online, are easily distracted. To get their attention web design needs to be much more striking. “Knowing that people are most likely to look at your internet thing for less than a minute before going back to refreshing Facebook or playing with their cat makes taking risks seem easier,” explains Ripps. “It’s important to captivate.”

To understand how people behave online – as OKFocus does – it’s also important to understand the irreverent, occasionally oddball, nuances of humour that exists there. This often appears in OKFocus’s work. One example is tugofstore.com, its tug-of-war-style website for product tagging site Svpply, which challenges users to play with a deliberately clunky interface where people place product images in either a shopping cart if “cool”, or a bin if “crap”. This sense of humour also comes from nostalgia for forgotten technology, particularly the remnants of the early internet: the clunky email logos, GIFs and under-designed web pages. “I played Doom on dial-up, using early Photoshop software and getting warez [pirated media] in IRC chat rooms,” remembers Ripps.

But there’s more to OKFocus than internet punchlines and revived web relics. It isn’t short of new ideas. For instance, in late 2013 the studio built an online art auction using blogging platform Tumblr, where auction house Phillips took a break from selling canvases and let anyone with enough cash bid for the work of emerging digital artists. It also built an interactive music video for the band Tanlines. The video, executed in the style of an Adobe Photoshop interface, allows viewers to manipulate the band members and scenery as they play. This kind of innovative thinking has seen OKFocus appear on the radar of larger consumer brands such as Nike, which recently commissioned the studio to design its Hyperfeel shoe’s promotional website.

No doubt more sizeable brands will look to OKFocus for its bold ideas and original coding. And Ripps, with his open-minded – and open-sourced – thinking, suggests more people will play a role in web design’s future. But only if more people know how to do it – which they certainly should, according to Ripps. “Everyone should speak html. I firmly believe that.”

http://okfoc.us/