Directors Library

Editorial Platform

A smarter, more capable digital platform for the premier independent film and video library.

Overview

Founded in 2017, Directors Library (DL) has quickly become the premier destination for filmmakers and film lovers to find resources, daily inspiration, and rich information within the film, video and creative industries. In 2020, WØRKS helped Directors Library transition from their early blog-style site to a comprehensive editorial platform capable of attracting a global audience’s attention and submissions. In 2023, Directors Library reengaged WØRKS to help construct the bold next evolution of the platform. This meant rethinking everything from the backend content structure to the frontend. The resulting platform evolves a beloved creative resource, shaping it into a true library and one-stop shop for inspiration and knowledge.

Sectors

  • Entertainment
  • Art

Timeline

  • 2023 - 24

Strategy

As Directors Library grew, so did their need for new systems that supported the growing amount of information on the site. With more information came new integrations and content typologies that needed to be seamlessly integrated across the platform, and DL had goals of including even more data and information per video than ever before. As we worked with Directors Library to understand how the site is currently used and the aspirations for its future, we learned that many users’ reading sessions begin with a direct link to an article page. This discovery, paired with the fact that DL intended to more than double the amount of content within articles, meant that article pages would need to act as their own foundational pages alongside the homepage. The inclusion of new content typologies like BTS imagery, still frames, long-form interviews, and director selects created a new need for a holistic approach to content organization site-wide.

All-New Look and Feel

It was important to underpin this next chapter of Directors Library with a refined design system. DL is, after all, a place for beautiful creative content, so our choices in typography, space, and color are all in service of this content in order to honor the work.

Design

With so much information and metadata across the site and many different article types, a unified design system and component library was paramount. We built a design system with flexible components that satisfy the challenges of both scale and unity. This begins with a foundation of grids, typography, color and spacing standards and ladders up to over 50 components, ranging from the all-new navigation to an enhanced search function.

Unified Multi-Point Content

Historically, the content on Directors Library had not been conveniently connected together by proper backend logic or front end interfaces. As we built the article pages into their own foundational pages, they became a hub for their own multi-point and related content. They’ve been designed to strategically and beautifully pull related data from other areas of the site, such as more videos in a series, BTS shots, selected stills from the Frames page, and even reference DL interviews with directors.