Interview about On Recruit Recruitment Website, winner of the A' Website and Web Design Awards 2025
This recruitment platform reimagines traditional job seeking by merging visually captivating design with a dynamic user experience. Drawing inspiration from Japanese street culture and incorporating danmaku effects, the site delivers a unique blend of aesthetics and interaction. The platform's innovative approach to presenting employer content aims to not only attract job seekers but also inspire them to engage deeply with the company's values and culture.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsIn Japan, street culture and participatory media like Niconico’s danmaku have shaped a generation of creatives who are deeply influenced by chaotic yet communal experiences. These cultural codes rarely intersect with corporate recruitment platforms, which often prioritize formality over authenticity. Our design aimed to reverse that. By blending danmaku-style visuals with refined UX, we created a sense of co-presence and dynamism that resonates with job seekers from design, fashion, and IT sectors—industries where individuality and collective energy are both highly valued. This fusion helped remove the sterile tone often seen in recruitment sites and instead positioned the company as progressive, inclusive, and rooted in cultural dialogue.
The technical challenge was to translate a visually dense concept like danmaku into a performant, interactive website. Inspired by the gaming industry’s use of multi-threaded rendering and offscreen canvases, we leveraged Pixi.js and a texture-based CMS system to manage hundreds of animated comments. This decision wasn’t merely technical—it was strategic. We knew from our research that job seekers in creative industries often judge company websites on both aesthetic appeal and technical sophistication. By delivering a real-time, fluid experience, we signaled to prospective candidates that this company values experimentation, advanced engineering, and expressive storytelling—all qualities that attract high-caliber talent.
The 35% spike in interaction confirmed our hypothesis: that job seekers are not just looking for information but also a brand experience. This finding redefined our design priorities. Rather than stripping back visuals for clarity, we chose to enhance interactivity through thoughtful transitions, hover feedback, and layered storytelling. In doing so, we resisted the binary of beauty vs. usability. For modern job seekers—especially creatives—an interface that is both expressive and usable communicates that the company understands their values. It’s a silent but powerful form of cultural signaling.
We chose a street photography aesthetic to break free from the sanitized visuals often found in corporate recruitment. Traditional employee portraits tend to be overly composed, erasing individuality in favor of uniformity. But the real culture of a company exists in its everyday gestures, glances, and imperfections. By shooting interviews in the style of fashion-oriented street snaps—common in Tokyo's creative neighborhoods like Harajuku or Nakameguro—we captured employees not as spokespersons, but as individuals. This direction aligned with our client’s brand values: diversity, openness, and authenticity. It helped communicate to potential candidates that this is a workplace where people are not just allowed but encouraged to bring their whole selves to work.
The biggest challenge wasn't technical—it was cultural. Convincing stakeholders to adopt a visual language rooted in Japanese street and counterculture required more than just aesthetic arguments. We needed to reframe what a recruitment site could be. Most corporate hiring pages are templated and transactional, designed to minimize risk and maximize clarity. We argued that this sameness is precisely what prevents companies from standing out in a saturated talent market.We built our case through user research: target audiences—especially creatives—responded more positively to expressive, even chaotic visuals, provided the user journey remained intuitive. We referenced the rise of "danmaku" commentary culture, not just as a visual gimmick, but as a reflection of how the next generation consumes media: fast, participatory, emotionally charged.By showing stakeholders that design could signal the kind of freedom and individuality the company promised, we aligned the site’s tone with its employer brand. Gradually, the internal resistance faded—not because we diluted our vision, but because we translated it into strategic value.
The custom typeface and illustrations weren’t decorative additions—they were the foundation of our storytelling. We wanted to avoid generic “corporate diversity” imagery or stock visuals that often dilute the unique voice of a brand. Working with SEVNZEL, who comes from a graffiti and pop-culture background, allowed us to inject raw energy and emotional tension into the site’s visual DNA.The typeface was designed to reflect a sense of individuality—its asymmetrical construction and soft distortions mirror the messy beauty of real-world creativity. Instead of conveying neutrality, it invites users to feel something. The illustrations served a similar role. Each graphic was crafted to echo the personalities and values of the team, from humorous depictions of work culture to abstract metaphors for curiosity and growth.This was a deliberate move to collapse the distance between employer and candidate. In a recruitment context, visuals are often sterilized to avoid alienation—but we took the opposite approach. We leaned into emotional cues, showing that sincerity and imperfection could be assets. That philosophy united the entire creative team, allowing design, copywriting, and motion to work in unison.
We approached the culture page not as a static manifesto but as an emotional experience—something to be felt before it is understood. Rather than presenting a list of values, we used motion and illustration to create a sense of rhythm, immersion, and psychological pacing. Each animation was choreographed to reflect the progression of a candidate’s mindset: curiosity, identification, empathy, and, finally, alignment with the mission.The animations were intentionally restrained in tempo and palette, inviting contemplation rather than distraction. We wanted users to slow down and absorb the atmosphere, not skim through slogans. This deliberate pacing allowed us to deepen engagement and deliver abstract ideas—such as “evolving through empathy”—without resorting to over-explanation.Moreover, in Japan’s saturated job market, where many companies rely on similar messaging, we needed a way to cut through the noise without shouting. Motion design, in this context, became a medium of subtle provocation—guiding the user to feel the difference rather than be told about it.Ultimately, this storytelling strategy helped transform recruitment content from obligation into inspiration. It gave users the feeling that they weren’t just applying to a company, but stepping into a shared worldview.
One of the most crucial turning points in the development process occurred during the first round of internal user testing. While the visual presentation was well-received, users reported a sense of detachment when transitioning from the animated landing page to the interview and culture sections. It became clear that while individual parts were compelling, they lacked a cohesive emotional arc.To resolve this, we reorganized the narrative flow of the site—restructuring the scroll behavior and adding micro-interactions that emotionally “stitched” one section to the next. This adjustment transformed the user journey from a series of highlights into a continuous, immersive experience. Feedback from both designers and non-designers confirmed that this helped users feel more connected to the people and values behind the company.Another major insight came from real-time social media reactions on launch day. Over 37,000 impressions and hundreds of engagements revealed not just traffic, but unusually deep resonance with the storytelling approach. Comments like “I’ve never seen a recruitment site like this” or “I want to work with people who think like this” validated our choice to depart from industry norms.Additionally, we iterated on performance and accessibility—ensuring the advanced visual effects didn’t compromise load speed or usability. Balancing aesthetic ambition with practical accessibility was a continuous effort throughout development.
The integration of Pixi.js allowed us to deliver a high-performance, game-like visual experience that feels lightweight and fluid, even on lower-end devices. However, the real innovation lies in how this visual layer is dynamically fed by the CMS. Rather than baking animations into static code, we created a system where danmaku (bullet curtain-style) messages—referencing a well-known feature from Japan’s Niconico platform—are authored through the CMS and converted into textures on the fly. These textures are then rendered via an offscreen canvas using multi-threaded drawing, ensuring that the browser’s main thread remains responsive.This approach enabled the site to keep its visual storytelling fresh without requiring developer intervention. For example, recruitment messages and key themes can be updated in real time, automatically reflected in the animated layer. It empowered the HR and marketing teams to continuously adjust messaging while preserving the immersive quality that makes the site memorable.From a performance perspective, this decoupled architecture allowed us to scale efficiently. By separating the content logic from the rendering logic, we could cache assets aggressively, optimize draw calls, and prioritize load speed—critical for retaining users who might otherwise abandon the experience before it unfolds.
On Recruit was never intended to be just another recruitment site—it was a provocation. In a landscape where many platforms rely on templated UI and generic corporate messaging, we wanted to prove that recruitment design could be a cultural statement. By integrating danmaku-inspired motion graphics and fashion editorial-style photography, we blurred the lines between job-seeking and cultural engagement, especially for younger audiences raised on visual-first platforms.We believe this approach foreshadows the next era of recruitment design—one that doesn’t simply communicate benefits, but immerses users in a brand’s worldview. As digital natives expect more intuitive, emotionally resonant experiences, we see a growing need to treat recruitment not as a static funnel, but as a dynamic journey that expresses identity, community, and challenge.Technologically, the challenge will be to build systems that are not only performant and scalable, but also modular enough to accommodate expressive storytelling. Our use of Pixi.js and dynamic CMS content is one blueprint—but what comes next could include personalized animations, AI-curated culture pages, or real-time community feedback loops.Ultimately, we envision a future where recruitment platforms are not just tools, but cultural interfaces—windows into how a company lives, thinks, and dreams.
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