Uretusjert

Debio certifies organic production in Norway and owns Ø-merket, the label on the packaging. The campaign itself comes from Debio Marked, which is a separate thing and easily confused with Debio. It plays on the rule that retouched advertising has to be labelled as retouched: organic food, the argument goes, is uretusjert. Unretouched. The posters carry a stamp saying exactly that, and they point at a web address.

They had the concept, the art and twenty PDFs ready. What they needed was somewhere for it to live. So it was about as plain as a brief gets. I got twenty PDFs and was asked to turn them into a website.

The campaign was drawn for paper and social, so most of the design work was deciding what those pieces become on a screen.

The signature device is the headline bar: white capitals on a solid block of colour that hugs the text. On a poster that's just how it was drawn. On a website it has to survive any line break at any width, so it's built in CSS rather than set as an image, with each wrapped line keeping its own block. That treatment carries every heading on the site.

The palette came out of the posters themselves, sampled from the headline bars and the Ø-merket artwork. Each production type gets its own accent, tied to its poster where one exists. I checked them all for contrast. One is a pale tint, so it's only ever an accent and never sits behind white text.

Typography is the one place I went against the source material. The print pieces set their headlines in Eames Century Modern, but the posters people actually saw on the street are Trebuchet, and the posters are what the site has to feel continuous with. So the site is Trebuchet throughout. That also sidesteps a font licence.

The PDFs come in pairs for each type of production, a short consumer-facing one and a longer technical note: milk, eggs, chicken, pork, grain, honey and so on. Line them up and they are the same document ten times over with different content in it. That made the site easy to shape: one page per production type, the same structure every time, with the original PDF still there for anyone who wants it.

The rest was making it read properly on a phone. Someone scanning a QR code off a poster in a shop is not going to pinch and zoom their way through a PDF.

It's a static site with the content kept as Markdown in the repo rather than in a CMS. Nothing changes after the campaign launches, and a CMS would only have been one more thing for someone at Debio Marked to keep an eye on.

They brought the campaign, the art direction and the documents. I did the website: the design decisions above, the build, and getting it live. This one was freelance, so it was mine end to end, from the first commit to the domain.

It's live at ømerket.no, which is where the posters point.

I don't have numbers for it. Analytics are switched off on the site, and I haven't asked Debio Marked what they're seeing from their side.