Variety500 honors the 500 most influential business leaders shaping the global $2 trillion entertainment industry.
The team at Variety wanted to create a microsite which honors prestigious people within the entertainment industry. With so many big names on the list we pulled out all the tricks to deliver a beautiful site.
With 500 people being honored each year the Variety team needed a place to spotlight some of the honorees. We created a spotlight module to display a curated list of ten honorees. The editors control who appears here and can easily update the list through the back-end.
For each honoree we tracked data points like country of origin, job function and media category. Given that we had that breadth of data we thought it would be fun to expose some of it in a visually impactful way. Users can toggle through the three data points and see what the breakdown of honorees is within that particular category.
Users coming to the site need a way to easily see everyone honored. Our solution was to create a landing page which allows users to scroll through the list of honorees. Each honoree has key information like their company name, title and bio accompanying their photo along with a flag which represents their birth country. Users can further refine who they see by filtering by category, line of work, location and year. Filters can be combined to drill down and see which people are honored in a particular segment of the list.
Users can access the profile of an honoree to see a short bio, career highlights, education, honors and philanthropy. The photos of the honorees were collected from various sources and we felt it was important for the aesthetic of the site that no matter whose profile you were on the look and feel stayed consistent. To achieve this we edited all 500 honoree photos to remove the background so we could place them on a uniform background. Variety offers even more data than what is displayed here as apart of their Variety Insight product. We felt this would be the perfect place to integrate a call to action and help drive users to the Variety Insight product.
To add in some more visual interest to the page we included a photo gallery on each honorees page which automatically pulls in photos from their Instagram feed.