01 / The pitch
A BETTER VERSION OF YOURSELF, delivered with the ease of a face cream ad. It is the film's bait, quoted without quote marks.
02
Landing Page The Substance
A fictional landing page for the Activator, the product from the film The Substance. No client and no brief: the point was to practise art direction from an existing visual language and to build three interactions I had never prototyped in Figma.
Key decisions
3 Rules from the film, used as product copy
1 Accent colour: the green of the liquid
∞ Looping marquee: the promise never ends
Figma Three interactions prototyped, no code
02 / Starting point
Why this exists
The Substance sells youth as a product: an injection that promises another version of you — younger, more beautiful, more perfect — and charges for it.
If the Activator were really on sale, what would its website look like? The exercise came down to three sets of questions:
01 — Language
- How do you sound like luxury skincare?
- Where should the promise start to unsettle?
- How much of the film does the page show?
02 — Visual
- Where does the green go?
- How big can the lettering get?
- How does the bottle draw the eye alone?
03 — Interaction
- How does the page open?
- What stays fixed while the page scrolls?
- How do you show a promise that never ends?
The obvious answer was to copy luxury skincare. The interesting one was to let the discomfort show through.
“Activate only once. Stabilize every day. Switch every seven days. Without exception.” — the product rules, straight from the film
The product The promise, with no hedging
03 / References
Where the language came from
There was no user research — there are no users. The work was reference work: watching the film for its title cards, reading MUBI's campaign material and looking closely at the product that appears on screen.
Looked at
- The film (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)
- MUBI campaign material
- The Activator packaging on screen
- 2000s skincare advertising
“Repetition is the message.”
YOUNG. BEAUTIFUL. PERFECT. is the product's pitch and the film's trap. Repeating it down the page, past the point of comfort, turns the copy against the thing it is selling.
“The green is not decoration.”
It is the colour of the liquid. Keeping it to the product and the CTAs only leaves the page cold and lets the bottle pull the eye on its own.
04 / Process
How it was built
01 — Gather
Board and grid
Film stills and MUBI's material on a single board. The grid came out of it: wide margins and type bleeding to the edge.
02 — Write
Copy before layout
The product rules were already in the script. I wrote the whole page as plain text before opening a single frame.
03 — Animate
Prototype in Figma
The actual point of the exercise: a splash before scroll, text pinned while its section passes, and an endless marquee running flat and in a circle.
Three interactions built from scratch
05 / The page
What came out
02 / The product
The Activator shot like luxury skincare, the film's three rules listed beside it and a single button.
03 / The footer
Black ground, the title card at poster size and the marquee running behind the credits.
06 / Afterwards
What I took from it
Learnings
- 01
Working without a brief is harder than it sounds. With nobody to say no, the only measure left is the reference you picked at the start.
- 02
Writing the copy before the layout saved the whole week. With the text settled, typography becomes a decision about hierarchy instead of filling space.
- 03
The three interactions took longer than the rest of the page put together — and they were the only reason the project existed.
01 — Redesign Brand Legacy Academy
Brand Legacy • Product Designer
