An online store the international press talks about
Major publishers like Financial Times, National Geographic, McGraw-Hill, Time Warner, and Disney commission their custom typefaces from internationally-awarded Parachute. So do multinationals like Ikea, Vodafone, Nestle, and Unilever, and international bodies like UEFA.
If you're already at the top, there's only one way up.
Parachute's site, which had already won global trust by selling taste and precision to designers and web designers, had to get… better. The "parachute" was due to evolve into a "balloon" — to take the aerodynamic form that does justice to its meticulous typefaces.
Mind the details.
Parachute's typefaces are made by Greek creators — engravers, graphic designers, decorators, and designers. The minimum time to build a family with just the basics (regular, medium, bold) is a year. A complete family — light, thin, italic, condensed, and so on — takes years to design and digitize. It's not just letters. It's punctuation, shapes, languages, ligatures, sidebearings… The award-winning Champion family has 4,300 glyphs.
It was meant to be.
We were asked to build the new website on a dynamic platform — one that would offer security and flexibility, and would be easy to manage. Parachute's perfectionists met Netstudio's perfectionists on the Drupal platform.
An illuminated manuscript on Drupal.
We knew only Drupal 7 could meet that level of detail, precision, and flexibility. Parachute's audience sees beyond what a mouse can grab. Designers want everything down to the pen stroke. So does the Parachute team.
The months that followed felt like a calligraphy exercise in a medieval monastery. Hidden mechanisms in every corner, motion on every typeface preview… Type a phrase and get back a rendered image.
Go to Typefaces, click Champion, hover until the Test Driver shows up, and hit Text.
Details you can't pull off at the last minute.
Look for detail in Parachute's typefaces and you'll find the same depth in how the site works — including checkout and the partner-payout system. We built those on Drupal Commerce.
Building websites with attention to detail is a demanding sport.
