Errol Morris needed a website as diverse, expansive, and audacious as his work in film. RubyStudio collaborated with Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, and Mr. Morris to create a website befitting the man who changed documentary filmmaking forever. The result: one of the most provocative and captivating websites we've had the pleasure of developing.
The Client
Errol Morris is one of the most important documentary filmmakers alive. The man who gave us The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, and Standard Operating Procedure didn't just make great films — he changed what documentary filmmaking could be. Roger Ebert called him a magician. The MacArthur Foundation called him a genius. We called him a client.
The Challenge
How do you build a website for a mind like Errol Morris? A conventional portfolio site — films listed, biography appended, press clippings archived — would have been a category error. Morris is not a brand to be packaged. He is a thinker, a provocateur, an essayist, a filmmaker, a commercial director, and an obsessive investigator of truth, and a conventional site would have flattened all of that into something unrecognizable.
The challenge wasn't to represent his work. It was to represent his thinking.
Our Approach
Working in close collaboration with Michael Bierut and William Drenttel, RubyStudio designed a site that dispensed with traditional navigation and categorization entirely. There is no "Films" page with a tidy filmography. No "About" page with a curated biography. Instead, the site cascades — content flows down the page in the order of thought, tagged by type (FILM, OPINION, WEIRDNESS, IN MEMORIAM, ABORTED PROJECTS) but never subordinated to a hierarchy that would impose false order on an inherently non-linear intelligence.
The design was conceived as a glimpse into a mind rather than a window onto a career. A visitor scrolling through errolmorris.com encounters a Quaker Oats commercial alongside a New York Times essay alongside a tribute to a beloved colleague alongside an analysis of a 1955 science fiction film — because that is how Morris thinks, and the site refuses to pretend otherwise.
The Outcome
The site launched around the time of The Fog of War and has remained essentially unchanged in design ever since — not because it hasn't been maintained, but because the design was right. More than twenty years later, errolmorris.com still feels like no other website. It is still being updated. It still surprises.
That, for a website, is a remarkable thing.