Conversations with Tyler Website

We created a mesmerizing, off-kilter website for a podcast with an uncommon perspective.

Conversation is the art of thinking in tandem. When eager minds meet, their interplay generates an emergent new entity: one plus one equals three.

Through a fearless style and incomparable preparation, Tyler Cowen’s Conversations have achieved this feat. The show is lively and unpredictable, pushing guests away from their practiced talking points. It is wide-ranging, disallowing listeners from isolating themselves from diverse topics and viewpoints.

Most of all, it is human. The fallacy about economics is that it’s just math – of course, it’s really about people. Conversations with Tyler evangelizes an economic viewpoint of the latter sort, encouraging listeners and guests alike to see the world just a bit differently.

CWT is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Mercatus brought us in to create a new website for the show after our friends at Adnauseum created an outstanding new brand identify for it.

The CWT site was centered around a long-scroll, quirky homepage

We knew the new brand was quirky, so we set out to create something users hadn’t seen before. We showed the client several unique interface concepts and used their feedback to hone in on a final concept. They liked it, but encouraged us to go even further!

🖼 Our sites are bespoke. If your brand has a unique perspective, we can help translate it into a digital experience that just feels “right.”

We arrived at a layout that at first looks scattered, but has an underlying mathematical structure to make it reliable and consistent. Within that framework, we imbued every element with an air of mystery and quirk. When you load the page, the logo draws itself in before the rest of the content reveals itself. Hovering over buttons and links causes vivid reactions. Scrolling down the page triggers a weird optical illusion. We set out to make people stop and think – and associate that moment with the show.

Ever seen a button that does this? Neither had we.

Of course, the site still needs to function properly. We used our custom WordPress methodology, Boxfort, to build the site with modern coding standards while allowing the client to stick to the WordPress CMS they wanted. We integrated the site with their CRM, Pardot, so form submissions and newsletter signups are centralized.

Client:	Conversations with Tyler
Team:	Chris Pau Adrienne Travis Ty Fujimura JT Fridsma Ernesto Iser Rebecca Testrake Nikki Munson
Year launched:	2018
Technologies:	WordPress Cantilever Boxfort ITCSS Fractal Animated SVG