Soft MatterAn identity and website for a studio that makes software feel physical.

Soft Matter is a studio of nine in Copenhagen. They make installations and interactive pieces for museums and brands: walls of water you push with your hands, shop windows where glazes melt as you walk past. Their website was a grid of video thumbnails on black. It weighed 38 MB, took four seconds to show anything on a phone, and looked like every other studio’s reel. After losing two pitches in 2024, a museum told them the site “didn’t feel like the thing you showed us in the room”.

The brief was an identity and a site that behave like the work. Something to touch on the first screen, a mark that still reads at 9 pt in a museum’s exhibition credits, and a home page that runs on a procurement officer’s four-year-old laptop. It also had to be looked after by developers who write installation software in C++, not websites.

1. 1

   The first screen is a piece of work

   We cut a showreel first. It was 14 MB and looked like everyone else’s. The home page is now a scene of soft drops you can push, raymarched in one fragment shader with no libraries. Only the box around the drops is raymarched; the floor, shadows and contact shading are worked out per drop, which keeps it at 60 fps on integrated graphics. Without WebGL, visitors see a still of the same scene.

2. 2

   Materials, not themes

   Clay, wax and glass change how the drops look and how they move. Clay is heavy and slow to settle. Wax holds on to anything it touches. Glass springs back and keeps to itself. We dropped a dark mode early, because, as Freja Holm put it, no gallery has one. The same three presets now drive the studio’s installation toolkit, so the site and the work use the same words.

3. 3

   A mark that joins

   The mark is two drops joined by a neck, drawn with the same smooth-minimum maths as the scene. It has three states, apart, touching and joined, and moves between them on a single spring. We drew a soft custom wordmark as well and threw it away: at the 9 pt size museums print credits, it read as a smudge. The wordmark is Unbounded, lowercase and tightly tracked.

4. 4

   Colour that survives shadow

   We chose the palette under the scene’s light rather than on white paper. Grey shadows made the drops look like a product render, so the ambient light is lilac and every shadow on the cream floor stays coloured. Type is plum ink, #1D1530, never black, so text sits in the same light as the work.

5. 5

   Pages that load before you notice

   Each case page leads with one still or one live scene, then the facts, then the story. Films load only when someone taps them. The home page went from 38 MB to 1.6 MB, and the shader that draws the scene is under 3 KB gzipped.

The site launched in March 2025, a week before the open studio that introduced the identity. Over the next six months, the median visit to the home page went from 38 seconds to 2 minutes 10, and 41% of visitors pushed the drops at least once.

New enquiries rose from about four a month to eleven, and two museum briefs since have named the site as the reason Soft Matter was asked to pitch. We handed the scene over as one documented component. Their developers have since added a fourth material, felt, without calling us.