DMZ

A founder looking for a program. A student looking for a course. Someone with a job looking for a weekend workshop. A bank or a government looking for a partner. All four of them landed on the same homepage, and the page had to work out which one you were before it could help you at all.

It gets worse every year. Each new program, course and partnership is another page, and every page wants a place in the menu. There were about twenty kinds of page to find a home for, spread across seven parts of the site. Which door each one sits behind is the decision that took the time.

Five doors. Three of them ask who you are: founders, students and working professionals, someone from a large company. The other two are simpler: coworking, and the startups DMZ has backed. Events and Apply came out of that list and now sit on screen all the time, because they aren't places you go. They're the two things people turn up to do, and you can do either from anywhere.

One more thing gets settled in the menu itself. Some student programs are open to anybody and some are only for TMU students. The menu says which is which, so nobody reads about one, gets interested, and only then finds out it was never for them.

All five doors are here as they were drawn, coworking included.

Three words for how DMZ should sound: supportive, innovative, credible. Anyone can nod at three words like that. So each one had to go and earn its keep by producing a real sentence — a line the homepage could actually open with.

None of the three ended up on the site. “You Build. We’ve Got Your Back.” came out of the next round. What these did was set the pitch, so that when somebody finally sat down to write the real headline they already knew what it had to sound like.

Then their own photograph, at two sizes. The small one sits in a flat panel with a wide margin around it — exactly what the hero does. And last, what the place offers, in DMZ’s own words. Six of them. Supportive stops being an adjective at the one about the resources being free, or close to it.

The idea wasn't ours and it wasn't new. DMZ already tells its founders to be camels: travel light, put up with rough conditions, go the distance, while the unicorn sprints through somebody else's money. That argument had its own section on the homepage and no colour of its own.

Now it has one. Warm, dry, the colour of sand. It sits next to the purple without picking a fight with it, and it is the section's own idea handed back as a colour.

DMZ's own team took it from here and built the site. What they got handed was a kit: about twenty page layouts, and a set of parts small enough to remember without looking them up. Five of the six buttons are the same button in a different colour.

So adding next year's program means picking a layout that already exists, and the menu goes on asking who you are before it offers you anything. Neither of those needs us.