SmartGreen

A group of students, a lab at the Politecnico and a simple question: can you grow well without soil, in a city, with what you find in a lab? Today the team runs hydroponic greenhouses and studies simulated Martian soil. The site has to speak to two audiences at once: students who might join, and companies who might build something with them.

I started from the brand book. SmartGreen is the parent brand, with a rounded mark and a serif wordmark. Terra and Space are the two research units, each with its own ground and its own colour: moss for the Earth, brown and sand for Mars. Space even has a pointy version of the mark. On the site, the Space pages take over the whole document, navbar and footer included, so the two marks are never on screen together.

No alternating dark and light bands. The whole site sits on one pale ground, with photography, video and the two units living inside rounded panels set into the page, and a film grain over everything. The reference was the calm of Dia and Arc, applied to a team that works with its hands: trays, tents, strawberries, notebooks.

A student team's site is easy to fill with numbers nobody can prove. So the rule became code. The greenhouse dashboard ships with sample data and says so in a band at the top. The water saving figure from the brand book stays off the site: a check fails the build if any page uses it before the team states what it is compared to.

The visitors arrive from a link, on a phone, with two minutes. The hero carries a growth timelapse that loads after the first image, so the page measured the same with and without it: 2.5 seconds to the main image on mobile, a performance score of 97. The menu is a drawer that follows the finger and lands with a spring.