Responses by ET Studio.

Background: With this website, we told the story of the little-known dual identity of private chef and nutritionist Giulio Urbani and his brand Root Food, highlighting his work and passion and introducing a world that rightfully belongs to the realm of art. Everything is based on the concept of storytelling, finding its utmost expression in the division into chapters and horizontal navigation as if everything were interconnected—one continuous story without interruptions.

Design core: The earth and the elements. It all starts from there, right?

The colors of pure things also inspired us, and it’s precisely those colors—one different for each category—that define the entire experience. Along with the images, which tell the unparalleled power of who Root Food is and what it represents, the most significant design element is the visual division of the website’s sections: we created a kind of recipe book that guides the user throughout the narrative.

Favorite details: The gallery within the “What” section and the menu. The images, in both sections, and the fluidity of movement transform the experience, making it purely playful for the user at times.

Challenges: The discovery or rediscovery of an almost-unknown world is always exciting, but it certainly comes with phases and processes that are not always linear. In the case of Root Food, it was about telling a world in an entirely new way, laying everything that was there on the table in terms of content and finding a common thread, a way to bring everything together and give it meaning.

Bringing together a multitude of images born from different hands and visions that are part of the same story. Standardizing them while allowing each shot to retain its own soul and assembling different pieces that make up a unique path, this was the greatest challenge.

New lessons: We were faced with a quantity of artworks that showed us how art itself is such a broad, extensive concept that we don’t often realize it.

Navigation structure: Structuring navigation is part of the initial phase of the design. It’s necessary to understand from the start what narrative experience you want to provide for users. What mattered to us in this case was to establish a narrative flow with minimal page changes, much like reading a story where you simply turn the page instead of jumping from one chapter to another.

From left to right, the pages appear horizontally on desktop—from top to bottom vertically on mobile. In this sense, we also aimed to align with users’ navigation habits, attempting to simultaneously showcase a different way of experiencing content.

Technology: The website’s storytelling unfolds on one long horizontal page, which gave us the opportunity to build a dynamic experience with the animation of title, paragraphs and images. Thanks to the combination of GSAP and Lenis and the FLIP technique, it became possible to achieve what we had in mind. We utilized Strapi as the CMS, which let us manage image compression and conversion to webp format. We built the website using Nuxt and rendered via server-side rendering.