CINEMA LIBERTAD • CHICAGO, IL

Liberating the Film and Television World

01  WEB DESIGN

02  COPYWRITING

03  SQUARESPACE DEVELOPMENT

Cinema Libertad liberates storytelling from the corporate, Eurocentric stories crowding our minds by uplifting the unique beauty and storytelling of diverse cultures.

Through their films, they use powerful visuals that put anecdotes into imagery so captivating you cannot peel your eyes away. Cinema Libertad roots each picture in the culture of the story or idea created.

In 2022, we were tasked with helping take their site from bare-boned to designed with intention. We designed the CL website to share their films in a vibrant, mold-breaking form with striking visuals and layouts allowing the pictures to shine.

Because their videos deserved to have a space that allowed them to cut through the noise and built a ship for them to take their next voyage further.

Decolonizing the Language of Cinema

From our very first conversations with Zapata, it was impressed on us that the mission behind Cinema Libertad is to take back what is native - the narrative, the land, the history. The language and beauty that was infiltrated by colonizers long ago.

However, it is and was never about waging war on the industry—but rather sharing their vision and shared love for storytelling, with immense passion behind it.

The website had a lot of jobs and emotions to express. We brought these to life through three key design elements: strong, rough fonts paired with scratch written text that was inspired by early activist and propaganda posters; layered collages of text, illustrations, photo and video to symbolize breaking the mold and quite literally breaking the 1920x1080 mold of standard video, and earthy yet vibrant colors that were inspired by the fertile native land.

THE DESIGN MOODBOARD

COLLAGE OF TEXT + IMAGES

RESILIENT CACTI

BOLD FONTS

NATURAL ILLUSTRATIONS

TOBACCO LEAVES

HAND-SCRATCH

FREEDOM

LAND

LIBERTY

JUSTICE

ACTION

FREEDOM LAND LIBERTY JUSTICE ACTION

Hover below to scroll through the website.

FULL SITE THIS WAY

Moving Images + Hover Effects

Cinema Libertad’s work is 100% video. Therefore, their website had to have moving images so that each space could draw the viewer deeper and deeper into each story. To incorporate this, we clipped sections of their pieces to create short-form content that was easily digestible. Additionally, we found spaces where we could use color and image in combination with create unique hover effects that delight and engage the viewer.